Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) Home Lab Configuration
Overview
This post will cover installing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) on an Intel NUC for the purpose of a lab environment. RHEV has two main components: RHEV-H and RHEV-M.
RHEV-H
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (RHEV-H) is a compact, full-featured virtualization platform built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It has a very small footprint (less than 100MB) and is built from only a subset of RHEL components plus the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM).
RHEV-M
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Management (RHEV-M) is a virtual management console built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It interacts with individual RHEV-H nodes using the Virtual Desktop Server Manager (VDSM). A VDSM agent is running on each of the RHEV-H nodes. RHEV-M allows administrators to manage multiple data centers and their network, compute and storage resources. In addition RHEV-M provides a central repository for storing virtual machines, disks, images and virtual machine snapshots.
Requirements
Install RHEV-H on Intel NUC
In order to install a RHEV-H node on our Intel NUC (bare-metal) we will need to download RHEV-H ISO and UNetbootin. The UNetbootin software allows us to create a bootable USB with the RHEV-H image.
Once you have bootable USB with the RHEV-H image you can simply start the NUC, insert USB and go through the RHEV-H installation.
Note: You may have to change the boot order in the BIOS of your Intel NUC or configure BIOS to boot from USB.
Install RHEL-M
In order to manage one or more RHEV-H nodes, a RHEL system running RHEV-M is required. You can use any 6.x version of RHEL for the RHEV-M system. As of the writing of this post RHEL 7 is not yet supported for RHEV-M. RHEL 7 will be supported with RHEV version 3.5. For the purpose of this lab I installed RHEL 6.6 as a Virtual Machine running under KVM on my PC.
Note: Make sure to allocate at least 4GB of RAM to the RHEV-M system.
Once RHEL 6.6 has been installed proceed with following steps:
- Register subscription
-
subscription-manager register
- Automatically attach subscriptions
-
subscription-manager attach --auto
OR
- List available subscriptions
-
subscription-manager list --available
- Attach a specific subscription (the pool id is listed in above command)
-
subscription-manager attach --pool=8a85f9814a7ea2ec014a813b19643ce5
- Enable required channels
-
yum-config-manager --enable rhel-6-server-rpms
-
yum-config-manager --enable rhel-6-server-supplementary-rpms
-
yum-config-manager --enable rhel-6-server-rhevm-3.4-rpms
-
yum-config-manager --enable jb-eap-6-for-rhel-6-server-rpms
- Install RHEV-M RPMs
-
yum update; yum install rhevm
- Configure RHEV-M
-
engine-setup
After completing the installation you can go to following URL to connect to RHEV-M http://:80/ovirt-engine
Configure RHEV-M
Once the RHEV-H and RHEV-M systems are configured we can add the RHEV-H node in RHEV-M. The first step is to configure the oVirt engine from the RHEV-H node to point to the FQDN or IP of the RHEV-M host.
Configure oVirt engine on RHEV-H host
-
ssh -l admin <RHEV-H FQDN or IP>
Add RHEV-H host in RHEV-M
Connect to RHEV-M host through following URL: http://:80/ovirt-engine
- Select the RHEV-H host and enter maintenance mode.
For the purpose of the lab we will use local storage. Since local storage is not shared across RHEV-H nodes a standalone data center will be configured that uses local storage.
- Configure local storage domain
- Attach ISO storage domain (configured when installing RHEV-M)
At this point we can start creating virtual machines, templates and various resource pools.If you have any questions regarding the Intel NUC, RHEV-H or RHEV-M setup please feel free to ask. In a future post I will cover API integration with RHEV-M (oVirt).
Troubleshooting
- Can't add local storage domain - This problem happens when you have configured RHEV-H host more than once in RHEV-M. Remove anything under /data/images/rhev on RHEV-H host.
- Accessing root shell on RHEV-H host - you need to connect via ssh as admin user and then press "F2" in the RHEV-H menu.
- ISOs not available when creating new VMs - The ISO storage domain must be attached to the RHEV-H host. Make sure hostname of RHEV-M host resolves from RHEV-H node otherwise add entry to /etc/hosts file.
(c) 2015 Keith Tenzer