Category Archives: Virtualization

Remotely Provisioning a Virtual Machine using Ansible and Libvirt

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Ansible exists to help automate the time consuming repeated tasks that technologist depend upon. One very common jobs is to create and tear down a virtual machine. While cloud technologies have made this possible to perform remotely, there are many times when I’ve needed to setup and tear down virtual machines on systems that were stand alone Linux servers. In this case, the main interfaces to the machine are ssh and libvirt. I recently worked through an Ansible role to setup and tear down an virtual machine via libvirt, and I’d like to walk through it, and record my reasons for some of the decisions I made.
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SELinux for Kubevirt on Centos

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Without disabling SELinux enforcement, an attempt to deploy a VM generates the following audit message:

type=AVC msg=audit(1504194626.938:877): avc: denied { transition } for pid=9574 comm="libvirtd" path="/usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64" dev="dm-19" ino=31526884 scontext=system_u:system_r:spc_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:system_r:svirt_tcg_t:s0:c408,c741 tclass=process

Running this through audit2allow provides a little more visibility into the problem:

#============= spc_t ==============
 
#!!!! The file '/usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64' is mislabeled on your system.  
#!!!! Fix with $ restorecon -R -v /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64
allow spc_t svirt_tcg_t:process transition;

This is probably due to running as much of the virtualization machinery in containers. /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 comes from inside the libvirt container. It does not exist on the base OS filesystem. Thus, just running restorecon won’t do much.

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Adding External IPs for Minishift

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In the interest of simplifying the development and deployment of Kubevirt, we decided to make sure it was possible to run with minishift.  After downloading and running the minishift binary, I had a working minishift cluster.  However, in order to deploy the api-server to the cluster, I needed an external IP;  otherwise I’d get the error:

Error: service "" is invalid spec.externalIPs: Forbidden: externalIPs have been disabled

Here is how I got around this error.

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Manually Deploying Kubevirt on OpenShift Origin

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It has been enjoyable to learn the Kubevirt code base and coding in Go.  However, unless the code gets deployed to servers, no one will use it in production.  I’ve been learning OpenShift as an integration point for Kubevirt.  Here are my notes for getting it up and running.  This is not quite production grade, but should help write a proper deployment mechanism.

Please note, as of KubeVirt v0.17 installing KubeVirt directly via manifests is deprecated. KubeVirt is now deployed using the operator pattern.

https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/docs/latest/administration/intro.html

The rest of this document is maintained for historical value only.

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Running SAS University Edition on Fedora 25

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My Wife is a statistician. Over the course of her career, she’s done a lot of work coding in SAS, and, due to the expense of licensing, I’ve never been able to run that code myself. So, when I heard about SAS having a free version, I figured I would download it and have a look, maybe see if I could run something.

Like many companies, SAS went the route of shipping a virtual appliance. They chose to use Virtual Box as the virtualization platform. However, when I tried to install and run the VM in virtual box, I found that the mechanism used to build the Virtual Box specific module for the Linux Kernel, the build assumption were not met, and the VM would not run.

Instead of trying to fix that situation, I investigated the possibility of running the virtual appliance via libvirt on my Fedora systems already installed and configured kvm setup. Turns out it was pretty simple.
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