[ovirt-devel] Updates on the oVirt Appliances (installation of engine and node)

[Fabian Deutsch]

Hey,

lately I've updated the oVirt Engine appliance image to be based on CentOS 7,
to get away from breakage which came from the fast moving forward Fedora (previously
the appliance was based on Fedora).
Besides of that I've simplified the kickstart and Tolik added support for cloud-init,
which will hopefully help to pave the way for a better integration into hosted-engine.

Another thing I've been working was to simplify the installation of the appliance
in use cases outside of hosted-engine.
Why? Because the Engine appliance image is a good way to start testing and using Engine.
It is an installed OS (CentOS 7) with all the necessary repos set up, and engine installed.
Ready to run `engine-setup --offline --config-append=ovirt-engine-answers` to get engine set up.

So why not simplify the consumption of this nice image for everybody?

This small job [0] builds an ISO [1] with a boot menu, which can be used to install
the Engine appliance [2] directly into a VM or onto a real host.
During the installation you can set a root password which you can then use after
installation to log in.
Please note that all the relevant files (installer + os image) are pulled from Jenkins,
so the time to install heavily depends on your internet connection.
For me it takes ~20min to get from a fresh VM until Engine is running.

When you run the ISO [1] you might also see the option to install Node.
It's not the classical Node, it's rather a Node appliance [3], based on CentOS 7,
containing vdsm, glusterfs and cockpit (all from the upstream sources with the latest bits).
The appliance was simple to create is mainly a way to get the latest upstream bit's in a
clean environment, to test our Node team cockpit move.
For me it took also roughly ~20min to get this appliance up and running.
You can mirror/cache the images locally if you want to speed up this process.

Theoretically that appliance can be used as a host for Engine, but in my initial trials
I failed to attach the node to Engine. But we can probably fix that in future.

This is more research and work in progress. But I am surely interested to make this mature in future.
One important step is to get the anaconda installer images from CentOS 7.1.
The CentOS 7.0 installer images are very outdated [4] and I can not use them. Temporarily I'm using
the Fedora anaconda images, but that has other drawbacks [5].

As a last note I can tell that at least the node appliance has some testing (installation), but
should gain more.

So take all of this with care, but feel free to experiment with the boot iso and roll
out your own Engine instances.
Help to fix the node appliance and feedback in general is welcome.

- fabian

--
[0] http://jenkins.ovirt.org/job/fabiand_boo_build_testing/
[1] http://jenkins.ovirt.org/job/fabiand_boo_build_testing/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/ovirt-ipxe.iso
[2] http://jenkins.ovirt.org/job/ovirt-appliance_engine-3.5_master_merged/
[3] http://jenkins.ovirt.org/job/ovirt-appliance_node-3.5_master_merged/
[4] http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=8239
[5] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1145130