[ovirt-users] does ovirt suit for managing for farm of test machines?

[Dave Neary]

Hi Michael,

On 06/26/2014 12:34 PM, Michael Cherkasov wrote:
> I have to manage about farm of 30 virtual machines
> the farm is hosted on two severs, it consists of windows, linux and
> solaris OSs.
> I use VirtualBox for virtualization.
> 
> I did all setup manually, if I need to apply changes I again  do this
> manually and this is real hell.
> 
> So now I'm looking for a way to automate this.
> I have a few gold images of OS, if I need to setup new machine I clone it,
> then I setup new network setting for it manually and setup 
> test demon.
> if I need to change test environment I have to change gold image, then
> remove all 
> test machines and clone gold images and again configure network and
> setup test demon 
> and all I need to do manually.
> 
> Can ovirt to help automate this scenarios?

I would say oVirt is part of the solution - the other part is to use
configuration management to provision test VMs rather than golden
images/templates - updating templates is always going to be manual and
cumbersome.

There are a few ways to provision VMs - one would be to set up Puppet
classes/Chef recipes and provision them using something like Foreman
(which integrates nicely with oVirt), another would be to write a
Kickstart file which you would pass to an install image to generate a
pristine test environment (information here:
https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installation_Guide/ch-kickstart2.html).

If you go the image route, oVirt 3.4 and later has made it easier by
implementing template versioning:
http://www.ovirt.org/Features/Template_Versions - at boot time you give
a template name and version to generate a new VM from a specific
version, to update a new version, boot an image off the previous latest,
make your required changes, and then save as a new version of the old
template.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary - Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards, Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com
Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13