Installation Instructions 0.95

This document is intended to help get oVirt quickly up and running using a pre-built appliance packaged in RPM format.

Throughout this document, we give commands to type at a shell prompt. By convention, if a command is meant to be run by a non-privileged user, we will precede it with a $ prompt. If a command is meant to be run by the root user, we will precede it with a #.

Prerequisites

There are a few prerequisites to running the oVirt appliance:

A machine that supports hardware virtualization. We will run a few KVM guests to simulate a production environment. This machine will be referred to as the "host machine" throughout the rest of the document. If you are familiar with different kinds of virtualization, you could use Qemu guests or Xen guests, but that is not covered here and the rest of this document will assume hardware virtualization.
Fedora 9 installed on the host machine with latest updates.
(Optional) Additional physical hardware, cabled to a private LAN

Getting oVirt RPMs

There are several RPMs that need to be installed on the host machine that are provided in a yum repository hosted on the oVirt website. Because this process updates libvirt and you'll need to restart libvirt at the end, shut down any existing virtual machines before proceeding. To get your host set up properly, run the following commands:

Install the ovirt-release RPM to get yum configured:

# rpm -ivh http://ovirt.org/repos/ovirt/9/ovirt-release-LATEST.fc9.noarch.rpm

Update any existing RPMs with newer RPMs available in the oVirt repository:
```
# yum update --enablerepo=ovirt
```
Install additional RPMs from the oVirt repository:
```
# yum install --enablerepo=ovirt ovirt-appliance ovirt-docs ovirt-node virt-viewer-plugin qemu-img
```
NOTE: The ovirt-appliance RPM is 424MB and will take some time to download.
Restart libvirtd to pick up the newer version:
```
# service libvirtd restart
```

Checking for KVM Support

Before starting the appliance you should make sure that the hardware you have has hardware virtualization enabled. This is generally an option in the BIOS, and it differs on each BIOS type. See your platform or motherboard documentation for details on where to enable this option. Once you have enabled hardware virtualization support in the BIOS, you can use the following commands to check to make sure it is enabled:

# grep -e svm -e vmx /proc/cpuinfo

You should see a result like:

flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2
ss ht tm pbe syscall lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm

Look for either vmx or svm. If one of these is present, your processor supports hardware virtualization. But the presence of this flag does not necessarily mean that it is enabled in the BIOS

# virsh capabilities | grep kvm

If the output of this command contains the word kvm anywhere, libvirt recognizes that you have KVM support on your host

If there is no output:

Make sure the kvm package is installed
```
# rpm -q kvm
```

Make sure either the kvm_intel or kvm_amd module is loaded

# sh /etc/sysconfig/modules/kvm.modules
# lsmod | grep kvm

Restart libvirtd to make sure libvirt has read the system capabilities correctly
```
# service libvirtd restart
```

NOTE: If you are running the oVirt Appliance and it appears to run very slowly, this can indicate that hardware acceleration is not being used.

Installing and Running the Appliance

Here are the steps to get the oVirt Appliance running:

If you want to manage real physical hosts, and you have a separately cabled management LAN, run this command on the host machine:
```
# create-ovirt-appliance -e eth1
```
Replace eth1 with the device that you have bridged to the physical LAN that the oVirt Nodes will be on.

If you do not have separate physical hosts to run the Nodes on, run this command on the host machine:
```
# create-ovirt-appliance
```
Without physical nodes you are limited to managing guests that run directly on the host.

If you want to manage guests running on the host that the oVirt Appliance is running on you can convert your Fedora 9 host machine into a Node by running:
```
# ovirt-install-node stateful
```
This will install the same core software that is used on the oVirt Node. NOTE: The host must be restarted after running this command.

The host can later be converted back by running:
```
# ovirt-uninstall-node
```

You should now have an appliance ready to be started.

Start the appliance either using virt-manager or the virsh command-line (on the host machine):

# virsh start ovirt-appliance
# virt-viewer ovirt-appliance

If you have real physical hardware cabled up, you can boot up any physical hardware you have cabled to your private LAN. Make sure that your hardware is set to PXE boot first, otherwise it will boot to the normal operating system.

If you do not have real physical hardware to run Nodes on, you can manage guests running directly on the host that is running the Appliance. Make sure to run the ovirt-install-node command as instructed above (followed by a reboot) to get this functionality.

Finally, you can bring up the main oVirt web user-interface by running firefox on the host machine:

$ firefox

Browse to http://192.168.50.2/ovirt

Default username/password is ovirtadmin/ovirt