Hi,
We decided to run the oVirt engine (Oracle flavor) outside the infrastructure. (Medium
infrastructure, 10 Hosts, iSCSI storage arrays)
We created a second, smaller infrastructure (Single host, local storage) for management
(engine) and monitoring (nagios, Dell storage manager etc..) . .
This secondary infrastructure's engine runs in the first infrastructure.
So, If you picture it, we're facing a "bootstrap" cross-dependency problem
where each engine need the other one to start.
This is actually a design we had when we were using Xen (Oracle's).
Xen provides the "xen create" command to start a VM, even w/o a manager.
Bootstrap problem solved.
We're moving to oVirt and I understand that oVirt does not support out-of-the-box
starting a VM w/o the engine.
I've found a workaround that seems to work and would like your advice :
- keep a dump of XML of the engine VM
# virsh -r dumpxml prodEngine > prodEngine.xml
- When necessary use virsh to start the engine
# virsh -c qemu:///system?authfile=/etc/ovirt-hosted-engine/virsh_auth.conf create
prodEngine.xml
The only visible problem is a warning at the VM that was started manually saying
"Newer configuration for next run". A restart clears the warning and there's
does not seem to be consequences with the VM that had been started from a dump xml.
Note : I understand that there is the "self-hosted" engine architecture that
solves that "bootstrap" problem. We're no into that for now. We had bad
experience with that design in the past.