How to install and configure Oracle Virtual Server 3.2 at home (Part 2/2)

How to install and configure Oracle Virtual Server 3.2 at home (Part 2/2)

This post covers the configuration of VM Manager using equipment at home, if you need to install it please read the first part of this post to learn how to do it.

One of the first things that I noticed by using VM Manager and trying to create my first VM is how complex it is, don’t get me wrong, the interface is actually clean but this is a complete datacenter virtualization solution and it’s aimed to manage multiple OVM servers using external storage, I’ll try to make it simple as this is our “home edition” configuration.

–Check an update of this post using version 3.3 here!

First open the URL address you received during the installation to connect to the management console, ignore the security warning and continue to the login screen. Enter the user and password.

Now we will review the following steps one by one

1. Discover the OVM server.
2. Configure storage.
3. Configure network.
4. Create server pool
5. Configure repositories.
6. Configure external storage to host ISOs and templates.
7. Import ISO images or templates
8. Create virtual machine.
9. Boot the VM.

1.- Discover the OVM server,

Click on the Discover Servers icon

Just add the agent password and IP address of your server, it will be added to the “Unassaigned Servers” section.

In this excercise the server name is ovmserver.

2.- Configure storage.

Then select your discovered server and go to “Physical disks” on the right panel, select your unused disk(s) and click the edit icon (pencil).
Click the Shareable checkbox and add the suffix SHARED to the disk name, don’t edit disks showing the Warning event.

3.- Configure network.
Go to the Networking tab and click on create Virtual NICs, then click on the AutoFill button and then Create Button. It will create 20 virtual nics at a time.

4.- Create server pool

Give it a name (I used sp1 in this example) and an unused IP address different from the one of your physical server.

Uncheck the “Clustered Server Pool” checkbox, this will allow you to use the local storage, then

Select the Physical Disk radio button and select your disks, remember to select only the unused ones with the word SHARED!

Click Next and follow the instructions to add the ovm server to the server pool.

5.- Configure repositories.

Now go to the Repositories tab (if you are using external storage then go to the Storage TAB and follow Oracle documentation).
We have to create a repository that will allow us to host the virtual machines. We will be using Using the local disk(s).

6.- Configure external storage to host ISOs and templates.

I download my software in a different machine (Windows), using VM Manager we load ISOs, templates and other sources of virtual machines via an import feature.

This import feature allow us to enter the URLs of the remote files, I tried to use other types of storage, even local storage but I was not able to find how to use it. I guess that its possible using the client utility directly on the OVM server via XEN commands, in this case I’m stuck with VM Manager.

Anyways, since I have all my software on a different machine I installed this cool utility called HFS file server.

It’s an executable file (no need to install it), once you run it will enable an HTTP file server in your machine. just drag the folders to the shareable section and that’s it!.

7.- Import ISO images or templates

Now we are ready to import ISO files or VM templates from the Windows server to the OVM server local repository.

Go to the Repositories TAB -> repo_localdisk -> Then  ISOs

and the Import ICON on the right panel  

In the box write down the URL where you have your ISOs, then click OK and wait for the job to complete.

If you want to import templates using VM MAnager the process is very similar, in the navigation panel to the left select Templates, then the import button on the right panel  

In this example the template is conformed by 2 .tgz files (in the picture above the second file address is incomplete).

8.- Create virtual machine.

We are almost there. Click on your VM server and then the Create Virtual Machine icon.

In the next screen select your local repository and give your VMachine a name, set memory and cpu limits.

then the network, here we will use one of those Virtual NICs created earlier.

Then we create the disks, I’m creating two, one CDROM and one Virtual disk.

If you are planning on creating a Cluster or RAC then click on shareable.

Select the ISO image to install the operating system on the new Virtual Machine.

Once we are done adding disk drives we have to enter the Boot Options, we need to boot using the CDROM drive, so place it at the top of the right box.

9.- Boot the VM.

At this point we are finally ready to boot the virtual machine.

From the Navigation panel on the left select the Server pool -> then the OVM server

and the at the right panel select Virtual Machines, select it and click on the Start icon 

Now you can Launch the Console icon to control your VM. in some screenshots I used Google Chrome browser, but the console doesn’t seem to be compatible, Firefox works well with it.

The post ended up being very long, even if I tried to not write a lot of details, still I hope you find it useful.