[ovirt-users] Educational use case question

Thu Apr 14 06:15:50 UTC 2016

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 5:18 AM, Michael Hall <mike at mjhall.org> wrote:
> Thanks for the response.
>
> I did see that page and certainly agree with the point under "Benefit to
> oVirt" heading:
>
> "This operational mode will attract users already familiar with it from
> other virt platforms."
>
> I'm happy building headless servers using CLI over SSH, but my colleague and
> students aren't and need a "nice" point and click web interface which will
> display a usable VM desktop etc. My colleague is most familiar with VMware.
>
> But the project doesn't look ready to go and I can't find a download.

The page mentioned is the "feature page" written during development.
This is in production for 2+ years now, and the page you should follow is:

http://www.ovirt.org/documentation/how-to/hosted-engine/

Also keep in mind:

1. There are some requirements not included in ovirt that you'll have
to supply yourself, including:
- shared storage
- usable name resolution - usually meaning dhcp+dns, with dns pre-populated
with back (and forward) records for the addresses in the dhcp dynamic range,
so that your guest OSes get these as hostnames (and not end up all having
hostname 'localhost', which is probably confusing for users).

2. The expected use-case of ovirt is a larger system, consisting of more
than one physical server, and dedicated storage.

If you still want everything on one host, you basically have two options:

3. NFS
loop-back mounting nfs is considered risky, due to potential locking
issues. Therefore, if you want to use NFS, you are better off doing
something like this:
3.1. Have the physical machine managed by kvm (virt-manager, virsh or
whatever)
3.2. Have a VM serving as an NFS server
3.3. Have another VM (or more than one) serving as a "host" using
nested-kvm
3.4. Either have the engine on another VM on the physical machine,
or use hosted-engine on the virtual host(s).

4. iSCSI
iscsi does not suffer the same locking issues when loop-back mounting,
so in principle you can run hosted-engine directly on the physical
host with part of the disk shared using iSCSI and loop-back mounted.
You can still use the setup described above in "NFS", with the main
benefit being (I think) easier migration to more hardware if/when
needed.

With any of the above, once you finish the setup, everything else
should be at least usable using the web interface.

Re console access - there is a "novnc" spice client that is pure
HTML5 and runs in your browser. I don't think it's used much, but
should work. There is also a websocket-proxy component allowing
access from places that can access the proxy but can't access the
hosts. But most people probably use native clients, usually
remote-viewer or the browser plugin.

Best,

> Also, an implementation that isn't stable and fully functional will probably
> do more damage than good as far as open source's rep in our lab goes.
>
> I know this isn't a use case that oVirt or RedHat are really interested in,
> but I feel it is important to expose students to real world production
> software and systems as much as possible ... all we had to work with last
> year was VirtualBox running on Windows 7!
>
> Mike
>
> On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 11:37 AM, Yair Zaslavsky <yzaslavsky at aconex.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> As far as I remember, oVirt does come with an all in one configuration ,
>> but looks like it was deprecated at 3.6, So can you try out the self hosted
>> engine?
>>
>>
>> https://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/engine/self-hosted-engine/
>>
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: "Michael Hall" <mike at mjhall.org>
>> To: users at ovirt.org
>> Sent: Thursday, 14 April, 2016 11:10:03 AM
>> Subject: [ovirt-users] Educational use case question
>>
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> I am teaching IT subjects in TAFE (a kind of post-secondary technical
>> college) in Australia.
>>
>> We are currently looking for a virtualisation platform that will allow
>> students to install and manage VMs via web interface.
>>
>> VMware is being proposed but I am trying to get KVM and the RedHat
>> ecosystem in the lab as much as possible.
>>
>> I have reasonable experience with running virt manager on CentOS 7, but
>> oVirt is new. I have it installed and running OK but am not sure how to
>> proceed with configuration.
>>
>> I basically want to run a single physical server which will be the KVM
>> host, the ISO and data store, and the home of oVirt engine ... in other
>> words a complete oVirt-managed KVM virtualisation platform running on one
>> physical machine (32GB RAM). It will only ever need to run a handful of VMs
>> with little or no real data or load. Is this possible/feasible?
>>
>> If possible/feasible, where should oVirt engine go ... on the host itself,
>> or into a VM guest?
>>
>> The web interface is what is making oVirt an attractive option at this
>> stage, as students will be working from Windows clients on a corporate
>> network. Do VM GUI display well in the browser?
>>
>> Thanks for any advice
>>
>> Mike Hall
>>
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>>
>
>
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-- 
Didi