KVM on Fedora 11 QuickStart Guide
With the upcoming release of RHEL 5.4, Red Hat officially enters the virtualization fray with a KVM-based solution. Although KVM is exciting for several reasons, e.g. it’s free, fully supported by the Linux kernel community, doesn’t require any special hardware past the increasingly common Intel-VT or AMD-V extensions, etc, its also represents the next stage of virtualization evolution.
I’ll expound in a future post about how and why (admittedly with the benefit of hindsight) KVM represents a far more elegant model for virtualization, but after the jump today you’ll find a minimal set of instructions to rapidly get a Debian Lenny virtual guest up and running on a fresh out-of-the-box Fedora 11 server installation.
Lengthy instructions on Fedora virtualization suitable for KVM and/or Xen can be found at the Fedora wiki The following lists the minimal set of steps to get a guest running focusing soley on KVM to the exclusion of Xen.
Our setup comprises a freshly installed remote Fedora 11 server serving as the KVM target (bash prompt server) and a local Fedora 11 laptop (bash prompt laptop).
First we’ll shell into the remote server to install and configure all the necessary KVM software. Verify we’re using Fedora 11 with a Intel-VT or AMD-V processor:
[root@server ~]# uname -a && egrep '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l
Linux server 2.6.29.4-167.fc11.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed May 27 17:27:08 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
4
This server is running the modified 2.6.29 Linux kernel that comes stock with Fedora Core 11. It possesses 4 processing cores enabled with Intel-VT. Installing the basic tools required for KVM is our first task, luckily Fedora provides a convenient meta-package:
[root@server ~]# yum groupinstall 'Virtualization'
Alongside kvm/qemu, the Virtualization group also includes the libvirt toolset. Libvirt provides a common abstraction across several types of hypervisors. This abstraction includes simplified installation and remote graphical console access a la $VMW’s VirtualCenter. To access these features we must start the libvirtd daemon.
[root@server ~]# /etc/init.d/libvirtd start
Starting libvirtd daemon: [ OK ]
Using the virsh command line tool, verify the currently guestless system is running and ready to accept commands:
[root@server ~]# virsh -c qemu:///system list
Id Name State
----------------------------------
Now we’re ready to install our guest. We’ll need to download an ISO image to install our virtual machine. To keep things simple we’ll go with Debian Stable aka Lenny (as of this writing). We’ll create a top-level directory to store both the ISO image and the virtual machine disk image:
[root@server ~]# mkdir /kvm && cd /kvm
[root@server kvm]# wget http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.2/amd64/iso-cd/debian-502-amd64-netinst.iso
...
[snip]
...
Saving to: `debian-502-amd64-netinst.iso.1'
100%[==================================================================================================>] 137,713,664 1.49M/s in 93s
2009-07-27 19:10:24 (1.56 MB/s) - `debian-502-amd64-netinst.iso' saved [137713664/137713664]
Now armed with the KVM/libvirt tools and an ISO image for installation, we issue a single virt-install command to a) create a backing disk image and b) boot a newly created virtual guest off of the ISO:
root@server kvm]# virt-install --connect qemu:///system -n lenny0 \
> -r 512 --disk path=/kvm/lenny0.qcow2,size=16 \
> -c /kvm/debian-502-amd64-netinst.iso --noautoconsole --os-type linux \
> --os-variant debianlenny --accelerate --hvm
Starting install...
Creating storage file... | 16 GB 00:00
Creating domain... | 0 B 00:01
Domain installation still in progress. You can reconnect to the console to complete the installation process.
The “domain” referred to in virt-install’s output is our new guest. We’ve created a single-core virtual server named lenny0 with 512 MB of RAM and a 16GB virtual disk housed on server at /kvm/lenny0.qcow2. Furthermore, lenny0 has been booted off of our Debian net-install ISO image.
Now we can use the graphical virt-manager tool locally from our laptop to connect to the virtual server’s graphical console (basically VNC) and kick off the Debian net-install process. In theory we should be able to run virt-manager locally on our laptop and connect over ssh to the libvirtd daemon on the remote server. In practice it’s still pretty shaky and has some onerous requirements. Notably that there’s no progress indicator informing how much longer remains before the connection initializes (and it takes a long time). So if you want to try it out, good luck, YMMV (hopefully someone at $RHAT puts some polish on this aspect soon).
I’ve personally chosen to avoid the whole debacle and just run virt-manager on the remote server and use X Forwarding over ssh to interact with it from the laptop. It’s slow, but sufficient for Debian’s curses-based installer (I actually did this across the continental US).
fedora:lm jruscio$ ssh -X root@server 'virt-manager' &
[1] 20038
The virt-manager tool should show a single VM, lenny0, running on server. Double-clicking on the lenny0 entry brings up the VNC console, that should show the Debian net-install splash screen. Start the installation and for the most part select all the defaults (I removed Desktop from the additional packages).
After the installer finishes it leaves the machine in a halted state. Boot the machine with the Run button above the VNC console and log in as root. As a final step install ssh and use ifconfig to determine the IP address DHCP granted the virtual server:
lenny0:~# apt-get install ssh
[snip]
lenny0:~# ifconfig eth0 |grep inet
inet addr:192.168.122.99 Bcast:192.168.122.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::5652:ff:fe46:6f93/64 Scope:Link
That was pretty easy and we’re now able to shell into our virtual guest from the physical server hosting it!:
server:~ jruscio$ ssh 192.168.122.99
jruscio@192.168.122.99's password:
Linux lenny0 2.6.26-2-amd64 #1 SMP Sun Jun 21 04:47:08 UTC 2009 x86_64