UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) has become a successfull successor of an outworn and obsolete BIOS firmware. Emulating UEFI based hardware on KVM/QEMU Virtual Machine is possible thanks to so called OVMF (Open Virtual Machine Firmware), which comes from EDK2 (EFI Development Kit), UEFI reference implementation. OVMF is available as an RPM package for RPM based distros (CentOS, Fedora, Red Hat). In case of Fedora release all we need is edk2-ovmf RPM package.
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Category: Virtualization
How to configure Docker Proxy on CentOS 7, RHEL 7
How to enable Proxy for Docker engine with or without authentication on CentOS 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7?
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OpenStack Pike VLAN and Flat network based installation using Packstack
In previous articles regarding OpenStack RDO installations we presented OpenStack deployments using Packstack automated installer script, which still required some post-installation networking configuration to be performed in order to accomplish whole deployment. This time we will try to prepare Packstack configuration file (answers.txt) in such way, that it does all the magic and no post-installation configuration is required. We will make full bridge:interface mapping so, that no further bridge setup is needed and the environment should be ready to use immediately after Packstack deployment.
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How to find qbr,qvo interfaces of the particular Instance in OpenStack
OpenStack networking topology is pretty complicated structure, even with it’s, let’s say, default configuration based on OVS (OpenVSwitch), not even mentioning about additional overlays, like OpenDaylight or Nuage.
If you are troubleshooting network issues in regard to a particular Instance (VM), it’s good to locate network overlay interfaces (qbr, qvo) assigned to that Instance to have a starting point to begin your network analysis from. You can then analyze inbound/outbound traffic on those interfaces using network protocol analyzers, like tcpdump/wireshark.
Below you can find few steps, how to locate qbr,qvo interfaces belonging to a particular Instance:
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How to Install VirtualBox 5.1 on Fedora 23 from RPMs
Oracle VM VirtualBox is a flexible open-source hypervisor for x86 computers from Oracle Corporation initially developed by Innotek GmbH. It runs on many platforms including: Linux, Windows, Solaris, providing great virtualization environment to run multiple VMs at a time.
In this tutorial we present how to install VirtualBox 5.1 on Fedora 23 from RPMs in few simple steps.
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Install and Configure KVM (Bridge Net Interface) on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a virtualization infrastructure for the Linux which requires a processor with hardware virtualization extension to be able to host guest sytems. KVM is convenient solution to test and try different operating systems if you don’t have a possibility to purchase expensive and power consuming physical hardware.
The below tutorial presents KVM (QEMU) installation and setup along with Linux Bridge configuration on CentOS7 / RedHat7 operating system.
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How to shrink OpenStack qcow2 image using qemu-img
If you transfer qcow2 images very frequently across OpenStack Clouds or between KVM and Openstack environments, they can quickly grow larger. Luckily qcow2 image size can be decreased to reasonable values using qemu-img tool. Below we present how to shrink Openstack/KVM qcow2 image.
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virt-what: Check if your remote server runs in virtual environment
Have you ever wondered if the server you bought at the hosting provider is in fact a dedicated server or just a VPS and what is the underlying virtualization environment your server runs on?
virt-what provides us the ability to detect if we are running in a virtual machine or on bare-metal (real hrdware). virt-what detects common types of virtualization: hyperv, kvm, openvz, qemu, virtualbox, vmware, xen, etc…
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Configure OpenStack Instance at boot using cloud-init and user data
The administration of the large-scale production cloud environments requires the management of dozens of customer’s virtual servers (OpenStack Instances) in the cloud on the daily basis. Manual configuration of the multiple newly created Instances in the OpenStack cloud at a time would be problematic for cloud administrators. Luckily, OpenStack is equipped with metadata service cooperating with the so-called cloud-init script, which together do the magic of automated Instances’ mass configuration.
Metadata service runs usually on Controller node in multi-node environment and is accessible by the Instances running on Compute nodes to let them retrieve instance-specific data, like IP address or hostname. Instances access metadata service at http://169.254.169.254. The HTTP request from Instance either hits the router or DHCP namespace depending on the route in the Instance. The metadata proxy service adds Instance IP address and Router ID information to the request. The metadata proxy service sends this request to neutron-metadata-agent. The neutron-metadata-agent service forwards the request to the nova-api-metadata server, by adding some new headers, i.e. Instance ID, to the request. The metadata service supports two sets of APIs: an OpenStack metadata API and an EC2-compatible API.
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OpenStack: Create Instance Snapshot to backup or migrate Instance
OpenStack Snapshots can be utilized to backup Instance before some critical changes are made on Instance OS or to migrate Instance to the new OpenStack Cloud.
In this tutorial we will create snapshot from existing Instance to launch it in different Cloud, but you can also create snapshot just to backup the Instance and restore it’s state later in the same Cloud, if needed.
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