Deploying oVirt in self-hosted mode

Deploying the virtualisation platform oVirt can be quite cumbersome. These are my installation notes on how to set it up in self-hosted mode where the engine-server runs as a guest in a VM instead of running on the host itself – much like the vCenter server of VMWare.

Pre-install tasks

As my network-setup consists of tagged vlans I set up the network manually beforehand. The oVirt installation will require a pingable gateway and DNS, unless setting up entries in /etc/hosts. So while additional configuration will be made in oVirt itself once it’s set up, the initial configuration in my case had to be manually set up.

ifcfg-enp3s0

TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=none
NAME=enp3s0
DEVICE=enp3s0
ONBOOT=yes

ifcfg-enp3s0.100

DEVICE=enp3s0.100
VLAN=yes
BRIDGE=br0.100
ONBOOT=yes

ifcfg-br0.100

DEVICE=br0.100
TYPE=Bridge
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=192.168.0.29
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=192.168.0.248
DNS1=192.168.0.136
DNS2=192.168.0.146
SEARCH="home.strahlert.net s2.strahlert.net"
DEFROUTE=yes
USERCTL=no

This is how you’d normally set up bridged tagged VLAN interfaces in RHEL. The bridge carries the IP-address.

However, oVirt wants to create an “ovirtmgmt” interface which would conflict with my br0.100 interface. I disabled the br0.100 and transferred all IP information to the VLAN interface enp3s0.100 instead. Thus making room for oVirt to create its “ovirtmgmt” interface and let it set an IP-address on that.

Shared storage

oVirt requires a shared storage. That storage can be run on the host itself. I opted for an NFS share. The export filesystem must be chowned vdsm:kvm (uid 36/gid 36).

/etc/exports

/kvm/iso        *(rw,anonuid=36,anongid=36,all_squash)
/kvm/vm         *(rw,anonuid=36,anongid=36,all_squash)
/kvm/export     *(rw,anonuid=36,anongid=36,all_squash)

Make sure the exported filesystems can indeed be mounted. When running firewalld, add the following services: nfs, rpcbind and mountd.

Deploy

The installation script nowadays uses Ansible to configure itself. I could not get this to fully work in either of versions 4.2.0 nor 4.2.1. It turns out the undocumented switch --noansible let the install script behave in the old unsupported fashion, but that atleast worked.

yum install http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/yum-repo/ovirt-release42.rpm
yum install ovirt-hosted-engine-setup ovirt-engine-appliance
hosted-engine --deploy --noansible

After a while the engine-server is deployed and can be managed by pointing a webbrowser to it. The initial task is to import the storage domain of the shared storage (ie the NFS-server) and activate it. After a short while the data center will be up and running.