rm-rf.ca

Having had a few weeks to play with virt capabilities of my new system, I have to comment on the virt capabilities in Fedora these days.

For my Spacewalk/RHN Satellite development work I need systems, lots of them. (consider the combinations of Spacewalk + Satellite, Oracle + PostgreSQL, CentOS + Fedora + Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and clients to register to them) Coming up with that kind of hardware isn't easy. I have resources available both locally and within Red Hat, but this poses some problems. Running a bunch of physical systems locally in a small office is hot, noisy, and a waste of power. Running them remotely at Red Hat, hardware is still limited particularly when you consider all the combinations, but most importantly it's not fun when your ISP caps encrypted upstream traffic to 30k/sec and you need to transfer large Java war's across a VPN to test your work.

I suspected stable virtualization would be an ideal solution for me and made sure to get the hardware that would let me tinker with it properly. jlaska's guide to setting up a virtual lab was very helpful, when all was said and done my set up looks something like this:

1. Cobbler running on the host OS with all the distro's I need imported.
2. One kickstart file used for all distributions that preps the box nicely for a Spacewalk install, and fetches a bunch of auxiliary files and a script to actually do a Spacewalk install all at once.
3. KVM, I can't remember for sure, I don't think I did much of anything beyond yum install of the virt tools to get it working. (such a nice change from using Xen/VMware/VirtualBox in the past)
4. Bridged networking, still pretty easy though I got caught up by the fact that the physical network interface no longer has an assigned IP. (confused me a bit)
5. LVM partition for each guest.
6. Cobbler system profile for each guest with a static IP.
7. Run koan against that system profile any time I want to create or re-create a guest.

This works fantastic for me. I can spin up a system in just about 5 minutes, run a single command and have Spacewalk installed on it in another 10 or 20.

virt-manager is fantastic, still very simple but extremely functional, and now works for doing ISO based installations. I've created guests for all the above mentioned distro's as well as Debian, Ubuntu, even a Vista install just to see what it's like. (it sucks) All went off without a hitch. Virsh meanwhile allows for even more control from the command line, which is frankly a must have.

Most importantly it's been rock solid. I haven't had a problem, it just works consistently. We ran into some Spacewalk on Fedora 10 bugs that we thought might be caused by some bizarre guest issues, every one of them was reproducible when I switched to a physical host. I don't think I'd hesitate to call it the simplest and most reliable virtualization technology I've ever used, so kudos and thanks to everyone who made it happen. My office is notably cooler and quieter and my work days more productive as a result.