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esdaniel

Member

From: Paris

Registered: 2010-02-01

Posts: 59

Website

Server baremetal KVM hypervisor on USB stick

A while ago I set up a micro-lab using vmware's ESXi (3.5) as per this blog post:
http://www.techhead.co.uk/installing-vm … -quad-core

Is anyone doing something similar using a KVM hypervisor and could share a quick how-to / summary of what they did to get that working?

otterfox

Member

Registered: 2010-08-05

Posts: 21

Re: Server baremetal KVM hypervisor on USB stick

Something like Proxmox?
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page

I haven't tried it out before but I've seen it setup before and it seems pretty simple.

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<insert hardware wankery>

esdaniel

Member

From: Paris

Registered: 2010-02-01

Posts: 59

Website

Re: Server baremetal KVM hypervisor on USB stick

Yeah, ProxMox is the kind of thing I was thinking of.

As it happens I've made some good progress...

I followed the guide for installing Arch on to a usb stick, thank you wiki! Booted the HP server with a live CD and installed to the 1GB usb stick directly, what was pleasing was the ability to say bye to FAT32 and install boot as ext2 and / as ext4, skipped swap for now based on various comments about it not being necessary for a hypervisor (anyone beg to differ?).  The image on the key ended up being quite large i.e. 890MB so I'll need to look at trimming that back if I keep with the 1GB usb stick though as I want to venture further into tuning the kernel for the hypervisor role I've ordered a 8GB stick so I've got enough space on the stick to compile some custom kernels for testing, will look at optimising the image later though with 8GB the need is much less pressing.

I booted the HP server from the USB key and proceeded to configure for KVM and installed consolekit package in order to get and use pam_ck_connector.so as recommended in wiki. Installed libvirt daemon to help with remote management. Then set up the local hard disk for LVM and created an ext4 partition there which I mounted in /home/vm.

Using libvirt with virt-manager GUI locally made it painless to remotely test the instance is running, using same tool I then defined the vm storage area as /home/vm.

Next step was to download an appliance (google appengine both for testing and some hacking I'm doing on that for a project). I copied that from desktop to the remote server and followed this guide to extract and convert the vmware image to a raw qemu image - all I did was get as far as the convert step, then I just used virt-manager to import the image and followed the prompts after which the image booted fine and I selected DHCP for network configuration.

Thereafter I was able to access my appliance via HTTP and SSH, everything is running fine :-)

I still need to tidy up the ability to use virtual networks, for now I'm being lazy and just allowing vms to get on the local lan via DHCP assignment from the router (dd-wrt) which is fine for what I'm doing in the home-lab. I can now say goodbye to ESXi and ensure I continue to champion using open source software where ever possible - gotta eat your own dog food! Excluding time I put in to read up and check all sorts of stuff I'd say you can get this done in about 90 minutes or less.

Next step will be to play around with vm migrations back and forth from remote server to desktop though I'll leave that for another day.

Last edited by esdaniel (2011-06-10 13:12:43)