[ovirt-users] Unable to add storage domains to Node Hosted Engine

[Andy Gibbs]

Hi,

I am trying to install a new server with oVirt.  I have previously had relatively good success with the all-in-one plugin on oVirt 3.6, but it is time to move to newer things and I am trying to get oVirt 4.1 installed on a clean platform.

I am unfortunately finding this very difficult and I hope someone here can help guide me in the right direction  :o)

My intention is to use oVirt Node as the base OS on the server, install Hosted Engine on it and also have the storage domains hosted on it too.

What I have achieved so far is...

1. Installed oVirt Node 4.1.2, generally using the default configuration
2. Changed the performance profile to "virtual-host" inside the web interface as per documentation suggestion
3. Created a new volume group, pool for thin volumes, and finally an XFS-formatted volume that mounts on /srv which will be used for the storage domain(s)
4. From the console on the node, I have created /srv/ovirt/data and /srv/ovirt/iso directories with ownership vdsm:kvm and access rights 0755, which I have then added to /etc/exports with the following configuration: rw,sync,no_subtree_check,all_squash,anonuid=36,anongid=36
5. When I install Hosted Engine from the Node web interface, I select NFS4 for the storage and provide the correct host:/path.  Other than that, and setting up static network details and email details, I follow the default prompts of the Hosted Engine setup.
6. The Hosted Engine setup seems to run through to completion, and I get a successfully installed message at the end
7. I open up the firewall on port 2049 for tcp and udp; this is done **after** the engine setup is complete since the setup procedure alters the firewall configuration and my modifications otherwise get lost.  I have confirmed that it is possible to mount these nfs shares both on the node itself and on the engine vm (once it is running).
8. I can log into the Hosted Engine web interface.

This is now where I run into problems.

The first problem is that no storage domains are registed, nor can I add any.  I get warnings like "The hosted engine storage domain doesn't exist.  It will be imported automatically upon data center activation, which requires adding an initial storage domain to the data center".  However attempting to do so gives errors like: "VDSM server.domain command CreateStoragePoolVDS failed: Cannot acquire host id: (u'fcdee6d8-c6fc-45fb-a60c-1df4b298f75a', SanlockException(22, 'Sanlock lockspace add failure', 'Invalid argument'))".  During Hosted Engine setup it seems that the /srv/ovirt/data storage domain is created, but I cannot import it.  I also tried to create a new storage domain at /srv/ovirt/iso and met with similar results: it creates it, but won't attach to it.

The next problem is that I can't restart the server from the Node web interface.  Clicking on the "Restart" Power Options button simply causes the whole system to hang.  It appears to shut down the Engine VM ok, it also terminates all ssh connections, but after that the console screen on the server just goes black and sits there.  You can still ping the server from the network but can't do anything or see anything.  Fortunately the Dell server has a remote console feature that enables me to manually restart the server, but this is not ideal at all.  This problem only occurs once the Hosted Engine is installed; before this is done, the "Restart" button works perfectly.

The final problem is that once the server has restarted, it takes about 10 minutes before the Node starts the Hosted Engine.  Is this correct?  I would have thought that once the Node is up, its first responsibility would be to get the Hosted Engine up, but you can see from the dmesg output that on average 530 seconds elapses before kvm is started.  Is there anything I can do to speed this up?

Any help would be gratefully received.  Or if anyone knows of a "oVirt for Dummies" (TM) style step-by-step installation guide that installed Node, Hosted Engine and the storage domains all on one machine, I would love to see that!!

Many thanks in advance!

Andy