Introducing oVirt virtual machine management via Vagrant.

In this short tutorial I’m going to give a brief introduction on how to use vagrant to manage oVirt with the new community developed oVirt v4 Vagrant provider.

Background

Vagrant is a way to tool to create portable and reproducible environments. We can use it to provision and manage virtual machines in oVirt by managing a base box (small enough to fit in github as an artifact) and a Vagrantfile. The Vagrantfile is the piece of configuration that defines everything about the virtual machines: memory, cpu, base image, and any other configuration that is specific to the hosting environment.

Prerequisites

  • A fully working and configured oVirt cluster of any size
  • A system capable of compiling and running the oVirt ruby SDK gem
  • Vagrant 1.8 or later
  • The oVirt vagrant plugin installed via $ vagrant plugin install vagrant-ovirt4

The Vagrantfile

To start off, I’m going to use this Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = 'ovirt4'
  config.vm.hostname = "test-vm"
  config.vm.box_url = 'https://github.com/myoung34/vagrant-ovirt4/blob/master/example_box/dummy.box?raw=true'

  config.vm.network :private_network,
    :ip => '192.168.56.100', :nictype => 'virtio', :netmask => '255.255.255.0', #normal network configuration
    :ovirt__ip => '192.168.2.198', :ovirt__network_name => 'ovirtmgmt', :ovirt__gateway => '192.168.2.125' # oVirt specific information, overwrites previous on oVirt provider

  config.vm.provider :ovirt4 do |ovirt|
    ovirt.url = 'https://ovirt/ovirt-engine/api'
    ovirt.username = "admin@internal"
    ovirt.password = "mypassword"
    ovirt.insecure = true
    ovirt.debug = true
    ovirt.cluster = 'Default'
    ovirt.template = 'vagrant-centos7'
    ovirt.console = 'vnc'
  end
end

In the configuration file, there are some pieces on which to elaborate. The URL, password, and username should be self-explanatory. The config.vm.network block has some special mappings (prefixed by ovirt__) so that it can be used in any provider, as well as oVirt. Vagrantfiles can manage lifecycles across providers, which is why the oVirt-specific mappings are in a config.vm.provider :ovirt4 configuration block as well.

Within our ovirt4 configuration section, we have set SSL verify to off (to allow self-signed certificates), the cluster is set to Default (and available in the oVirt UI), and the template to use as a starting point is vagrant-centos7.

The base template will need to be created per your environment, but a starting helper script for redhat based distributions such as CentOS is available here. It basically installs some base packages like the oVirt agent but also sets up a local user vagrant inside the VM that is required to proceed. Please read through it carefully.

Getting to it

In the directory where the Vagrantfile lives, we can create and start a VM.

$ vagrant up
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'ovirt4' provider...
==> default: Creating VM with the following settings...
==> default:  -- Name:          test-vm
==> default:  -- Cluster:       Default
==> default:  -- Template:      vagrant-centos7
==> default:  -- Console Type:  vnc
==> default: Waiting for VM to become "ready" to start...
==> default: Starting VM.
==> default: Waiting for VM to get an IP address...
==> default: Machine is booted and ready for use!
==> default: Rsyncing folder: /home/vagrant/ => /vagrant
==> default: Setting hostname...
    default:
    default: Vagrant insecure key detected. Vagrant will automatically replace
    default: this with a newly generated keypair for better security.
    default:
    default: Inserting generated public key within guest...
    default: Removing insecure key from the guest if it's present...
    default: Key inserted! Disconnecting and reconnecting using new SSH key...

If you look in oVirt we now have a virtual machine named test-vm running.

vagrant vm listed

We can do things such as manage snapshots:

$ vagrant snapshot list
==> default: Retrieving list of snapshots...
id     description     date

$ vagrant snapshot save somename
==> default: Creating snapshot...

$ vagrant snapshot list
==> default: Retrieving list of snapshots...
                                  id     description                          date
3dd34cbf-4698-446f-82bb-00ac66931411        somename     2017-02-10T05:34:53-06:00

$ vagrant snapshot delete 3dd34cbf-4698-446f-82bb-00ac66931411
==> default: Deleting snapshot...

$ vagrant snapshot list
==> default: Retrieving list of snapshots...
id     description     date

We can SSH into the box or run commands via SSH:

$ vagrant ssh
Last login: Wed Feb  8 21:27:23 2017 from marc-pc

$ hostname
test-vm
$ logout
Connection to 192.168.2.238 closed.

$ vagrant ssh -c 'hostname; whoami'
test-vm
vagrant
Connection to 192.168.2.238 closed.

We can also run provisioners against the machine. Add this to your Vagrantfile:

  config.vm.provision "shell",
    inline: "whoami >> /home/vagrant/somefile"

Now let’s see what happens when we use it:

$ vagrant provision
==> default: Rsyncing folder: /home/vagrant/ => /vagrant
==> default: Running provisioner: shell...
    default: Running: inline script

$ vagrant ssh -c 'cat ~/somefile'
root
Connection to 192.168.2.238 closed.

Lastly, we can tear down the VM and all of its artifacts:

$ vagrant destroy -f
==> default: Halting VM...
==> default: Waiting for VM to shutdown...
==> default: Removing VM...