Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), which is a complete enterprise virtualization management solution for servers and desktops, provides fully integrated management of your virtual infrastructures. RHEV is based on and built using two open source projects: Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), which is open source software that comes with all standard Linux distributions, and oVirt. Based on the popular oVirt open virtualization management project, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization positions itself as a strategic virtualization alternative to proprietary virtualization platforms with performance advantages, competitive pricing, and a trusted and stable environment.
Step-by-step, you'll learn how to build and manage Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization from scratch with various advanced features and troubleshooting steps. You'll also dive deep into the RHEV internal architecture and components.
Chapter 1, An Overview of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, gives you a basic introduction to RHEV, its internal architecture and components, and the basic hardware and software prerequisites.
Chapter 2, Installing RHEV Manager and Hypervisor Hosts, shows you how to set up and configure the RHEV Manager and access the web-based admin portal, install and configure RHEV's hypervisor hosts, and install and connect to the report portal in order to report scenarios of your virtual infrastructure's resource usage.
Chapter 3, Setting Up the RHEV Virtual Infrastructure, shows you how to create a virtual data center and cluster, add the hypervisor host to cluster, configure storage, and perform networking.
Chapter 4, Creating and Managing Virtual Machines, shows you how to create virtual machines, templates, derive virtual machines from the template, take live snapshots of virtual machines, and back up and restore of virtual machines using export and import disks.
Chapter 5, Virtual Machine and Host High Availability, shows you how to set up the virtual machine host availability, various cluster policies for cluster hosts, and perform live migration of virtual machines.
Chapter 6, Advanced Storage and Networking Features, briefs you about various storage disks options, such as sharing disks across virtual machines, direct LUN mapping from the storage, moving virtual machines across different storage domains, shaping the network traffic's VNIC profile for guest operating systems, and hot plugging of network adapter and memory into virtual machines.
Chapter 7, Quota and User Management, talks about applying quota to your virtualization infrastructure with user-role-based access control and integration with common directory services.
Chapter 8, Managing a Virtualization Environment from the Command Line, shows you how to set up the command-line tools in order to manage your virtualization infrastructure other than the standard RHEV Manager web-based interface.
Chapter 9, Troubleshooting RHEV, talks about various logfiles of the RHEV manager and hypervisor hosts and provides you with steps to put your RHEV virtualization infrastructure into maintenance mode for any planned outage.
Chapter 10, Setting Up iSCSI, NFS, and IdM Directory Services for RHEV, shows you how to set up your Red Hat Enterprise Linux server as an iSCSI, the NFS storage server for RHEV virtual machine data storage, the ISO library to store ISO, and export the domain to export the virtual machine for backup and restoration, and set up and configure IdM directory services on RHEL to integrate RHEV with the Red Hat IdM directory service for user management.
Appendix shows you how to upgrade RHEV environment from Version 3.3 to 3.4. This chapter is available as a bonus chapter and can be downloaded from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/7402OS_Appendix.pdf.
To set up a demo environment for this book, you need a valid Red Hat account to access the Red Hat software and support portal or, optionally, an evaluation version of RHEV:
Please note that the current RHEV GA release is 3.4, but the book is based on a 3.3 release. So if you access the preceding evaluation link, it will direct you to 3.4. Please create an evaluation account, log in to https://access.redhat.com/downloads/, and choose the RHEV Manager channel rhel-x86_64-server-6-rhevm-3.3 for the manager deployment.
You will also need the following set of hardware and software in order to run the examples in this book.
The following are the hardware and software requirements of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization manager 3.3:
Hardware: The commodity's physical hardware or virtual machine
Operating system: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Update 5
Software channels:
rhel-x86_64-server-6-rhevm-3.3
rhel-x86_64-server-supplementary-6 -c
jbappplatform-6-x86_64-server-6-rpm
The following are the hardware and software requirements of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor host:
Hardware: Commodity virtualization-enabled physical hardware supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Update 5
Software: RHEV-H image (for RHEV-M 3.3)—downloadable from https://access.redhat.com/downloads/
The following are the optional requirements that are needed to run the examples in this book:
Red Hat IdM Directory Service:
Hardware: The commodity physical hardware or virtual machine that acts as a directory server
Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Update 5
Software: Identity management (ships by default)
ISCSI / NFS storage service:
Hardware: The commodity physical hardware or virtual machine that acts as a storage
Operating system: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Update 5
Software: NFS/iSCSI-related package ships with default operating systems
If you are a system administrator who is interested in implementing and managing open source virtualization infrastructures, this is the book for you. You need a basic knowledge of virtualization and its use cases and some very basic Linux command-line work experience.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "This command will switch off SELinux enforcement temporarily until the machine is rebooted. If you would like to permanently disable it, edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux and enter SELINUX=disabled."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# rhn-channel -a -c rhel-x86_64-server-6-rhevm-3.3 -c rhel-x86_64-server-supplementary-6 -c jbappplatform-6-x86_64-server-6-rpm Username: "yourrhnlogin" Password: XXXX
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Finally, label the ISO domain with a name that will be unique and easily identifiable on the Storage tab of the administration portal".
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