DaleBewley

Dale Bewley

I'm vegan and I mountain bike a lot.

Contact

• Email: [[MailTo(dale AT bewley DOT net)]
• IRC: dbewley (not there often, sometimes #fedora-admin)
• GPG key: 4F6056DE
• Fedora Account: dale
• Social Networks: Mugshot
• Blog: http://tofu.org/drupal/blog/1
• Home: http://dale.bewley.net

Activities within Fedora

• Actively work on FWN Virtualization Beat, other misc. activities such as bug reports and a few pkgs in the old days.
• I just volunteered to work on the Virtualization release notes.
• All my wiki contributions

Notes To Self

Virtualization Release Notes

I'm gathering links to become oriented with the Fedora Docs Project and Virtualization features for F10. Howto

• Docs/Beats/HowTo
• Docs/Beats#Fedora_Release_Notes_Beats

Content

• F10 Notes and F9 Notes and F8 Notes
• Features/VirtStorage
• Features/VirtRemoteInstall
• Virtualization_Quick_Start

Virtualization Release Notes Scratch Space

Unified Kernel Image

The kernel-xen package has been obsoleted by the integration of paravirtualization operations in the upstream kernel. The kernel in Fedora 10 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not support booting as a dom0 until such support is provided upstream.

The most recent Fedora release with dom0 support is Fedora 8. Booting a Xen domU within a Fedora 10 host must be via a paravirt_ops kernel or with xenner. Xenner runs the guest kernel and a small Xen emulator together as a KVM guest.

Please note that KVM based solutions require hardware virtualization features in the host system. Systems lacking hardware virtualization are not support Xen guests in any manner.

For further information see Features/XenPvops and Features/XenPvopsDom0.

Virtualization Storage Management

Detailed Description Fedora 8 introduced the ability to manage existing guest domains remotely using libvirt. It was not possible to create new remote guests due to lack of storage management capabilities. This feature is to add the ability to list, create and delete storage volumes from a remote host using libvirt. This includes the ability to create raw sparse & non-sparse files in a directory, allocate LVM logical volumes, partition physical disks, and attach to iSCSI targets. [edit] Benefit to Fedora

This will enable the virt-manager tool to remote provision new guest domains, and manage the storage associated with them. It will provide improved SELinux integration, since the APIs will be able to ensure that all storage volumes have the correct SELinux security context when being assigned to a guest.

Scope

• List storage volumes in a directory, and allocate new volumes, raw files both sparse and non-sparse, and formats supported by qemu-img (cow, qcow, qcow2, vmdk, etc)
• List partitions in a disk, and allocate new partitions from free space
• Logic to an iSCSI server and list volumes associated with an exported target
• List logical volumes in an LVM volume group, and allocate new LVM logical volumes
• Automatically assign correct SELinux security context label to all volumes when associating with a guest (ie, virt_image_t)

For further details see Features/VirtStorage.

Remote Installation of Virtual Machines

Detailed Description Fully support remote guest creation in virt-install and virt-manager. This entails allowing a way to specify existing managed storage on the remote connection, or provisioning new storage on an existing pool at install time. Install methods are either PXE or a managed cdrom.

Ideally coupled with this will be better remote connection support: use libvirt's avahi advertising to search for potential remote connections when adding a connection in virt-manager.

Benefit to Fedora Remote VM installation isn't for everyone but it's pretty compelling for folks managing more than one physical machine for virtualization. A central box can be used to do all provisioning, where previously an admin would have to interact directly with the host. This will also encourage interested users to manage their storage and installation media using libvirt's storage capabilities, whose benefits are outlined at the VirtStorage feature page.

For further information see Features/VirtRemoteInstall.

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