Hello,
is there a (step-by-step) guide on how to configure Rockstor to be a Virtualisation Host? It doesn’t matter so much which solution (Virtual Box, KVM, …)
I couldn’t find an “easy” guide to follow…
Kind regards,
George
( Search Keywords: virtualbox virtualisation )
@papalexo Welcome to the Rockstor community. As you may have gathered Rockstor isn’t really aimed at being a virtualization host in the traditional sense akin to Proxmox et al but given it’s essentially a CentOS 7 with a few customizations then your best bet is to search on KVM and CentOS 7 and then heed the custom systemd scripts included in Rockstor so that you might ensure mount points are available were you to want to use them in you VM’s.
Hope that helps.
I had issues running it on ESXi and getting it to recognize SMART and had issues with reboots. Since ESXi gives the main drive a virtual ID every time you reboot the ESXi host machine, Rockstor would not be happy when you fired up that VM. It can be done but from my experience you can’t just fire up a VM and let it run. As much as it would be nice to have it on a VM having a dedicated machine to run Rockstor + Storage isn’t an expensive. I found several old Dell T5500 work stations on ebay very cheap and they are overkill for the task.
You can install libvirt qemu-kvm, it’s old versions tho in the style of redhat. So you may want to add repo like jmliger/virt7-upstream and then see vfio-blogspot part1-4 for instructions to get started,
Offtopic , I installed dev-tools to rockstor and compiled libvirt adn qemu myself, it actually compiled ok but it broke rockstor services so had to reinstall. Maybe it was extra python plugins needed for compiling that broke rockstor.
Hello,
I finally managed to install virtualbox, I list the steps:
Running rockstor 3.8-13 and virtualbox 5.0.22 (latest version)
I chose to download the virtualbox files manually from here:
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/
I used VirtualBox-5.0-5.0.22_108108_el7-1.x86_64.rpm
at this moment I created a vbox user and a dedicated share for my VMs.
I want to be able to modify the VM files from my PC so I added the following to the parameter to the samba share:
force user = vbox
next step was to install php management for virtualbox, I followed:
https://www.liberiangeek.net/2014/09/installing-virtualbox-centos-7-headless-server-support-phpvirtualbox/
I changed the default httpd port from 80 to 81 in httpd.conf otherwise it interferes with rockstor’s web management
vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
at this moment the php management should be running nicely.
if someone proposes any optimizations or clarifications to the steps, I’ll happily update them.
Regards,
George
Do you mean rockstor as the hypervisor (not the guest)?
Two ways:
Install KVM on it
Consider RockStor as Centos7 and you could with KVM assuming you meet the requirements. This is a big undertaking as you’ll eventually want to extend the UI from rockstor to KVM management (or likely just use two Web UIs). Will you use shares off Rockstor for the storage or just keep them separate (likely requiring different physical disks). Also you need to consider network, can you use a different interface for this or create some bridges or OVS without breaking rockstor?
Just make JSON rockons that run a full OS. This is all integrated and makes sense but they are docker containers and unless you map a volume and put everything on it, you’re likely going to lose changes restarting docker. Also, what are you running, you likely have a better docker project that does that already (like a web server).
for KVM - http://mwiki.yyovkov.net/index.php/Linux_KVM_on_CentOS_7
http://jensd.be/207/linux/install-and-use-centos-7-as-kvm-virtualization-host
A small remark regarding systemd: if you want to make sure the service launches on boot you should also issue systemctl enable httpd. Something similar can probably be arranged for the hypervisor itself, although you may have to write your own systemd unit file.