[Ovirt-devel] Installing a VM in oVirt 0.96

[Perry Myers]

Carb, Brian A wrote:
> Installing a VM in oVirt
> 
> Appliance Host: Dell Optiplex 745, VT-capable, x86_64 Nodes: four cells
> of ES7000/one, each with 8x at 3.4GHz and 32GB memory
> 
> Downloaded and installed 0.96 release on top of Fedora10 as indicated
> in the documentation. Successfully PXE booted 4 ES7000 nodes, and all
> show up in the oVirt dashboard. Defined a storage pool using the
> /ovirtnfs share from the appliance at 192.168.50.2 Created a Virtual
> Machine using one of the NFS disks, 4cpu and 1024mb
> 
> However, I'm unable to install into that VM. If I launch the QEMU
> viewer as the VM launches, I can select the Fedora option from the PXE
> installer... but the fedora install always reports an error with the
> network interface. If I select retry, the install goes a little
> farther, downloading the install.img and running the installer. However
> the system hangs for a long time at "Retrieving installation
> information for f10-x86_64-updates..." and then fails at "Unable to
> read package metadata..."

The initial network error you get that is solved with a retry I have seen 
every time I try to provision Fedora from a kickstart in oVirt.  Hitting 
retry has always fixed it for me.  The problem is probably a transient 
network issue, like the network bridge not being fully up and forwarding 
traffic by the time the guest gets to this phase of the install.

If you have bugzilla access and can file a bug at bugzilla.redhat.com 
under Other->Virtualization Tools->ovirt-node we'll hunt this down and try 
to fix it.

After the retry though provisioning generally works for me...  It could be 
a few things...  The way we have the appliance set up, we provision from 
cobbler but the cobbler repos are just pointers to upstream Fedora 
mirrors.  So first thing to check would be to make sure that from a Node 
you can access (ping) the internet.  If not, that's probably the issue. 
If you can, it could be a mirror problem since sometimes mirrors are 
unreliable.

> Any ideas?
> 
> Also, I saw someone mentioned installation from an ISO - is this
> supported? Is it possible to use existing VM images? I might be able to
> specify "boot from HD" and then dd an existing image - but i was
> looking for a more official method :-)

We do support provisioning from ISO files.  There should be something on 
the wiki about this, if not Darryl Pierce is the developer who set that 
up.  The short of it is that you add an ISO image to the /cobblernfs 
directory on the Appliance.  Once the ISO is there you need to use the 
cobbler image add
command to add the ISO image to cobbler

This will make the image ISO show up in the oVirt UI under the 
provisioning drop down.

Try that out and let me know if it works.

For disk image provisioning, we have plans to support that as well.  Just 
not implemented yet...

Perry