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Posts in Virtualization
Expanding VMWare guest storage and extending LVM volumes and ext3 file systems to use the new storage
One of my production vSphere virtual machines came close to running out of space this past week. Expanding guest storage with vSphere is a breeze, and I wanted to jot down my notes in this blog post. To expand the size of a virtual disk, you will need to open the virtual infrastructure client, right click your guest and click "Edit Settings". Once the virtual machine settings window opens, you will need to navigate to the disk that you want to expand…
$ read more →Creating KVM guests with virt-install and qemu-kvm
In my KVM presentation, I discussed how to create KVM guests using the virt-install utility. To create a KVM guest, you can run the virt-install utility with one or more options that control where the guest will be installed, how to install it, and how to structure the guest hardware profile . Here is one such example: Under the covers virt-install executes qemu-kvm (at least on RHEL derives distributions), which is the process that is responsible for encapsulating the KVM guest in userspace. To start a guest using qemu-kvm, you can execute something similar to the following: While virt-install is definitely easier to use, there are times when you may need to start a guest manually using qemu-kvm (certain options aren't available through virt-install, so understanding how qemu-kvm works is key!)…
$ read more →VMWare tools opensourced
I just came across the open vm tools website. The site hosts the source code to VMWare's vmtools package, and will be the future home for development surrounding this package. I have encountered a number of issues with vmtools in the past, and the fact that it was closed source made debugging problems difficult. This is exciting news!
$ read more →Testing out live CD distributions with KVM
I read over the latest KVM putback log last night, and saw that KVM now supports booting from ISO images that are accessible via HTTP (it uses libcurl under the covers). This is pretty fricking cool, and allow you to boot in recovery mode without requiring local media or PXE, and provides a super easy way to play around with live CD distributions. To use this feature, you will first need to install KVM build 87 from source. Once that is complete, you can add the URL to your qemu-kvm command line: You can also fire up virsh and "edit" the URL into the XML data…
$ read more →Redirecting the CentOS and Fedora Linux console to a serial port (virsh console edition)
During my KVM testing, I wanted to be able to use the virsh "console" command to access the console of my guests. This would make remote management a whole lot easier, since the default remote management interface (vnc) was a bit of overkill. To get virsh to allow me to console in, the first thing I did was update the menu.lst to get grub to write to the serial port: serial --speed=115200 --unit=0 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1 terminal --timeout=10 serial In addition to the two items above, you also need to make sure you disable the splash screen. Next up, I had to adjust the kernel entries in the menu.lst to write to the serial port (ttyS0)…
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