Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM) Deployment and Configuration

Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager based on oVirt, which is a free, open-source virtualization solution.

Engine

The workhorse of Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager is the oVirt engine (engine), which is a WildFly-based Java application that runs as a web service and provides centralized management for server and desktop virtualization. The engine provides many features including:

• Managing the Oracle Linux KVM hosts
  
• Creating, deploying, starting, stopping, migrating, and monitoring virtual machines
  
• Adding and managing logical networks
  
• Adding and managing storage domains and virtual disks
  
• Configuring and managing cluster, host, and virtual machine high availability
  
• Migrating and editing live virtual machines
  
• Continuously balancing loads on virtual machines based on resource usage and policies
  
• Monitoring all objects in the environment such as virtual machines, hosts, storage, networks
  

The engine communicates with the Virtual Desktop and Server Manager (VDSM) service which is a host agent that runs as a daemon on the KVM hosts. The engine communicates directly with the VDSM service on Oracle Linux KVM hosts to perform tasks such as managing virtual machines and creating new images from templates. The majority of tasks you can do through the Administration Portal. Additionally, you can perform a subset of tasks using the VM Portal.

Host Architecture

The engine runs on an Oracle Linux server and provides the administration tools for managing the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager environment. Oracle Linux KVM hosts provide the compute resources for running virtual machines.

Engine Host Requirements

The engine host system requirements are:

• Oracle Linux 8.8 (or later Oracle Linux 8 release) with Minimal Install selected as the base environment for the installation.
  
• Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6, Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7, or Red Hat Compatible Kernel.
  

Note

Do not configure the same host as a standalone engine and a KVM host.

Refer to the following tables for the minimum and recommended hardware requirements for the engine host system within the following deployment sizes:

• Small deployment (up to 128 KVM hosts and 1,250 VMs)
  
• Medium deployment (up to 512 KVM hosts and 5,000 VMs)
  
• Large deployment (up to 1024 KVM hosts and 10,000 VMs)
  

Important

For medium and large deployments, you should run the engine-vacuum command on a regular basis to maintain the databases by updating tables and removing dead rows, allowing disk space to be reused.

Table 3-1 Engine Host System Hardware Requirements – Small Deployment

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	64-bit two (2) core CPU	64-bit four (4) core or greater CPU
Memory	4 GB of available system RAM	16 GB or greater of available system RAM
Hard disk	25 GB local writable hard disk	50 GB or greater of local writable hard disk

Table 3-2 Engine Host System Hardware Requirements – Medium Deployment

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	64-bit four (4) core or greater CPU	64-bit eight (8) core or greater CPU
Memory	16 GB of available system RAM	32 GB or greater of available system RAM
Hard disk	50 GB local writable hard disk	100 GB or greater of local writable hard disk

Table 3-3 Engine Host System Hardware Requirements – Large Deployment

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	64-bit eight (8) core CPU	64-bit sixteen (16) core or greater CPU
Memory	32 GB of available system RAM	64 GB or greater of available system RAM
Hard disk	75 GB local writable hard disk	150 GB or greater of local writable hard disk

Note

If Data Warehouse is installed and if memory is being consumed by existing processes, consider using the recommended amount of system memory based on deployment size.

Table 3-4 Engine Host System Network Interface Requirements – All Deployment Sizes

Minimum	Recommended
One network interface card (NIC) with bandwidth of at least 1 Gbps	Two or more NICs with bandwidth of at least 1 Gbps

KVM Host Requirements

Minimum system requirements for Oracle Linux KVM hosts:

• Host must be on-premise,
  
• Oracle Linux 8.8 (or later Oracle Linux 8 release) with:
  • Minimal Install selected as the base environment for the installation
    
  • Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6, Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7, or Red Hat Compatible Kernel.
    
• 64-bit dual-core CPU
  

Recommended: Multiple CPUs

The CPUs must support either the Intel VT-x or the AMD AMD-V hardware virtualization extensions and the extensions must be enabled in the host’s BIOS. The CPUs must also support the No eXecute flag (NX).

• 2 GB RAM
  

Maximum Tested: 6 TB

The amount of RAM required varies depending on guest operating system requirements, guest application requirements, and guest memory activity and usage.

• 1 network interface card (NIC) with bandwidth of at least 1 Gbps
  

Recommended: 2 or more NICs with bandwidth of at least 1 Gbps

Multiple NICs are recommended so that NICs can be dedicated for network intensive activities, such as virtual machine migration.

• 60 GB of locally accessibly, writable disk space dedicated to Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, allocated as follows:
  

Allocation	Size
/ (root)	30 GB
/boot	1 GB
/var	29 GB

Storage Requirements

Before you can create virtual machines, you must provision and attach storage to a data center. You can use Network File System (NFS), Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), or Gluster storage. You can also configure local storage attached directly to hosts.

Storage devices in Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager are referred to as data domains, which are used to store virtual hard disks, snapshots, ISO files, and templates. Every data center must have at least one data domain. Data domains cannot be shared between data centers.

Networks

Use bond network interfaces, especially on production hosts

• Use VLANs to separate different traffic types

• Use 1 GbE networks for management traffic

• Use 10 GbE, 25 GbE, 40 GbE, or 100 GbE for virtual machines and Ethernet-based

storage

• When adding physical interfaces to a host for storage use, uncheck VM network so that

the VLAN is assigned directly to the physical interface

Logical Networks

n Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, you configure logical networks to represent the

resources required to ensure the network connectivity of the Oracle Linux KVM hosts for a

specific purpose, for example to indicate that a network interface controller (NIC) is on a

management network.

You define a logical network for a data center, apply the network to one or more clusters, and

then configure the hosts by assigning the logical networks to the hosts physical interfaces.

Once you implement the network on all the hosts in a cluster, the network becomes

operational. You perform all these operations from the Administration Portal.

A management network is used for communication between Oracle Linux Virtualization

Manager and the hosts.

• A VM network is used for virtual machine communication, a virtual machine’s virtual NIC is

attached to a VM network. For more information, see Creating a Logical Network in the

Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager: Administration Guide.

• A display network is used to connect clients to virtual machine graphical consoles, using

either the VNC or RDP protocols.

• A migration network is used to migrate virtual machines between the hosts in a cluster.

By default a single logical network named ovirtmgmt is created and this is used for all network

communication in a data center. You separate the network traffic according to your needs by

defining and applying additional logical networks.

One logical network is configured as the default route for the hosts.

Data Visualization with Grafana

Be default engine will install the Grafana

Grafana is a web-based tool used to display data collected from the data warehouse database (ovirt_engine_history database). Data from the Engine is collected every minute and aggregated in hourly and daily aggregations. Data retention is defined during engine setup in the scale setting of the data warehouse configuration

Scalability Limits

The following tables contain the scalability limits for the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager host, Oracle Linux KVM hosts, virtual machines and storage.

Table 3-5 Manager Host Limits

Component	Small Deployment	Medium Deployment	Large Deployment
Servers managed by one engine	128	512	1024
Concurrently running virtual machines	1250	5000	10,000
VLANs managed by one engine	1024 (for all size deployments)
Servers managed per data center	250 (for all size deployments)

Table 3-6 Oracle Linux KVM Host Limits

Component	Maximum
Physical CPUs (cores)	384
Memory	6 TB
Concurrently running virtual machines on a single host	600, depending on the performance of the host

Table 3-7 Virtual Machine Limits

Component	Maximum
Virtual CPUs	256
Virtual RAM	2 TB
Virtual NICs	10

Table 3-8 Storage Limits

Component	Maximum
Storage domains	50 per data center
Hosts per storage domain	Unlimited
Logical volumes per block domain	1500
Virtual disks per fibre channel/iSCSI storage domain (including virtual disk snapshots)	1500
Virtual disks per NFS storage domain (including virtual disk snapshots)	Unlimited
Fibre channel/iSCSI physical LUNs per storage domain	400
FC/iSCSI physical LUNs managed by Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager	2000
Maximum direct LUN size (physical LUN presented to a VM)	64 TB
Maximum virtual disk size	500 TB (limited to 8 TB by default)

Engine Installation options

1. Dedicated Engine on physical server
   
2. Self-Hosted engine
   
   

Dedicated Engine

To maintain a dedicated engine, a separate physical server is required, especially if high availability is a priority. More physical servers will be necessary, and the engine node cannot be used for VM deployment; external devices must be utilized to ensure high availability.

Self-Hosted engine

Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, a self-hosted engine is a virtualized environment where the engine runs inside a virtual machine on the hosts in the environment. The virtual machine for the engine is created as part of the host configuration process. And, the engine is installed and configured in parallel to the host configuration.

Since the engine runs as a virtual machine and not on physical hardware, a self-hosted engine requires less physical resources. Additionally, since the engine is configured to be highly available, if the host running the Engine virtual machine goes into maintenance mode or fails unexpectedly the virtual machine is migrated automatically to another host in the environment.

A minimum of two self-hosted Engine hosts are required to support the high availability.

Self-Hosted perquisites

• A minimum of two (2) KVM hosts and no more than seven (7)
  
• A fully-qualified domain name for your engine and host with forward and reverse lookup records set in the DNS.
  
• A directory of at least 5 GB on the host for the oVirt Engine Appliance. During the deployment process the /var/tmp directory is checked to see if it has enough space to extract the appliance files. If the /var/tmp directory does not have enough space, you can specify a different directory or mount external storage.
  

Note

The VDSM user and KVM group must have read, write, and execute permissions on the directory.

• Prepared storage of at least 74 GB to be used as a data storage domain dedicated to the engine virtual machine. The data storage domain is created during the self-hosted engine deployment.
  

If you are using iSCSI storage, do not use the same iSCSI target for the self-hosted engine storage domain and any additional storage domains.

Attention

When you have a data center with only one active data storage domain and that domain gets corrupted, you are unable to add new data storage domains or remove the corrupted data storage domain. If you have deployed your self-hosted engine in such a data center and its data storage domain gets corrupted, you must redeploy your self-hosted engine.

• The host you are using to deploy a self-hosted engine, must be able to access yum.oracle.com.
  

Deploying Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager(OLVM ) setup using a Self-Host Engine

OLVM deployment is limited to supporting only Oracle version 8.

In a self-hosted environment, shared storage is essential; without it, a self-hosted setup cannot be achieved.

To install Oracle Linux, download the installation images from one of the following locations:

• 
  Oracle Linux yum server at https://yum.oracle.com/oracle-linux-isos.html.
  
• 
  Oracle Software Delivery Cloud at https://edelivery.oracle.com.
  

Installing the Oracle 8 OS

Mount the Iso and boot from the ISO

Select software selection minimal install and enter other required details .Click begin to install .

The OS installation will require some time. Once the OS installation is finished, we can begin the deployment of the Self-host engine.

Self-Host deployment

Run below commands to prepare the host for the installation

You can either create a prep.sh file, insert the commands below, and execute it, or you may run the commands one at a time.

dnf update -y

dnf install oracle-ovirt-release-45-el8 -y

dnf config-manager –enable ol8_baseos_latest

dnf clean all

dnf install kernel-uek-modules-extra -y

init 6

Once reboot is completed .Run below commands to install engine

dnf install ovirt-hosted-engine-setup ovirt-engine-appliance -y

dnf install cockpit-ovirt-dashboard -y

firewall-cmd –permanent –zone=public –add-port=9090/tcp

firewall-cmd –reload

systemctl enable –now cockpit.socket

Once installation is completed

Access the cockpit URL through any web browser. – https://serverip/hostname:9090

Create network bonds. I am utilizing 4 NICs: 2 for management, migration, and VM console, and the other 2 for VM traffic. Depending on your environment and NICs, you can implement NIC bonding. While NIC binding is optional, it is recommended for the best performance and provides redundancy for NIC failovers.

Note :- Active-active adaptive bond not support .user active-passive or 802.3ad / LACP

To configure the host-engine .Click on Virtualization option and click on host engine start option

Verify that the required DNS records for the engine and host have been created.

Enter Engine VM fqdn and Ip and other details .click next

Enter admin password and you can also configure mail server details

Review details and click on prepare VM option

Installation may take a while. The engine utilizes local storage for its creation. After the installation is complete, shared configuration is needed.

Once installation is completed .click on next

I am utilizing the NFS shared storage. Based on your requirements and availability, please configure the details of the shared storage.

Click on finish deployment

Installation will take some time

Installation is completed successfully .Click on close option

Browser engine fqdn – https://enginefqdn

Click on administrator portal

Enter username and password and click on login

KVM Host Installation

Install OS using a Oracle 8 ISO

Once OS installation is completed

Run below commands to install

dnf update -y

dnf install oracle-ovirt-release-45-el8 -y

dnf config-manager –enable ol8_baseos_latest

dnf clean all

dnf install kernel-uek-modules-extra -y

dnf install cockpit -y

sudo systemctl enable –now cockpit.socket

init 6

Once server is rebooted . Open server cockpit url – https://ip/hostname:9090 and configure nic bond .

Once NIC bind configuration is completed .Open engine dashboard > compute > host > click on new option

Enter name ,hostname/IP , and password

Choose the host engine by selecting ‘deploy’. (You may skip this option if you prefer not to set the host as a self-hosted host.)Note :-

A minimum of two (2) KVM hosts and no more than seven (7) self-hosts .

Click on OK. I am utilizing a virtual environment. Therefore, I am not setting up any power management. If you are using a physical server, you can configure power management.

Host preparation will take sometime

Creating a new storage domain

Storage > storage domain > click on new domain

Enter shared storage details .I am attaching the nfs shared storage

Create a new Network

Network > networks > click on new

Enter network name and select VM network .enter other details based on your requirements

Attach uplinks to the network

Compute > hosts > select host > network interfaces

I am setting up bond1 for the VM network.

Drag and drop network .

VMnet network is connected to Bond1

Similarly you can configure for other hosts

Uploading the ISO

To create a VM, an ISO image is required

Storage > Disks > Upload

Choose ISO and other details and save

Upload will take some time based on ISO size and environment

Creating a VM

Compute > Virtual Machines > New

Enter name and click on create instance image to create a disk

Enter disk name and size

Select Network and click on advance options

Specify memory and cpu configuration

Boot options > Select first boot option as CD-ROM and click on attach Iso and select ISO image

Select VM and click on Run and click on console option

You can use native vnc console or you can download vnc client and use vnc client to access the VM.

Install OS

Once installation is done .you can access the VM

VM Migration

Select VM and click on migrate option

Select destination and click on migrate

VM migrated successfully node2 to node2

Monitoring

On home page click on monitoring portal

Enter username and password

You can either access/use the default monitoring dashboard or choose to create a personalized one.