[ovirt-users] oVirt Hosted Engine Deployment Issues (and fixed!)

[Jonathan Woytek]

Hello all. I've been trying to get a hosted-engine style deployment up and
running on a small three-hypervisor cluster for prototyping some things
before they get moved into a production environment. My hypervisors each
have a 802.3ad bonded interface with several VLANs trunked over the link.
The network is not currently connected to the internet, but can be for
updates and the like. There is DNS available and correctly configured.

I struggled for a few days trying to get the hosted engine to deploy
correctly. Some issues I encountered were minor documentation issues (and
mostly just me misinterpreting something that was written). For example,
when choosing an image source, I could choose cdrom, file, or something
else, and I tried to choose file (thinking "image file", since I had an ISO
to use for building the engine vm). Of course, it would bomb because it
wanted me to give it a preconfigured engine file, NOT an ISO. I eventually
figured I'd just get the appliance engine file, and went that route (and,
in that case, that part worked!).

Then, it started to bomb consistently right after starting the network
configuration step. It turned out that the motherboards I had (Supermicro)
did not have UUIDs encoded on them--they were blank. As a result, the vdi
step was failing to gather the information it needed, but it kept dying
with error messages that were pretty difficult to decipher. I eventually
stumbled across the UUID as "None" in the return block, which finally led
me to dmidecode to verify that the UUID was blank. Then I had to figure out
how to actually get the UUID set. I found an AMI utility that helped me get
them set to something, though it didn't actually set them correctly. In the
meantime, Supermicro helpfully replied to my support request with a link to
a utility they provide to do the same thing (though I wish that had been
documented somewhere on their site!).

UUIDs finally set, I started to work through a few other issues, and
finally came to the point where it was gathering some network information
before going to do the next step, and now it kept dying saying that the
hostname was not unique, then it listed every IP address configured on the
system (and there were several). DNS was working, and pointed to the
correct IP address for the hostname. The hostname was set correctly. I
could not get this to resolve. I got frustrated and posted on twitter. A
few nice people here saw it and recommended that I join the mailing list.
That's why I'm here now.

Before I posted here, though, I wanted to try again when I was fresh and
not having dealt with all of the previous problems. My first attempt was to
drop the hostname into /etc/hosts, thinking maybe the install wasn't
consulting DNS or was confused because there were several IP addresses.

BINGO. This fixed the "not unique" address problem!

... now I just had to go and clean up a botched installation because it
also couldn't find the hostname for the hosted engine (also in DNS, but I
just put it in /etc/hosts to hopefully get around whatever issue that is).

So.. long story short.. Thanks for good software and for being so willing
to support it, and thanks for putting up with reading this whole thing.
Now, if someone can explain why DNS isn't being consulted for host names
correctly, that would be super... :)

jonathan


-- 
Jonathan Woytek
http://www.dryrose.com
KB3HOZ
PGP:  462C 5F50 144D 6B09 3B65  FCE8 C1DC DEC4 E8B6 AABC
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