Homelab:oVirt

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Notes for installing and configuring oVirt using a self-hosted engine for a homelab environment.

Introduction

oVirt is a free, open-source virtualization management platform. It allows centralized management of virtual machines, compute, storage and networking resources, from an easy-to-use web-based front-end with platform independent access. oVirt consists of two basic components, oVirt engine and oVirt node. The oVirt engine can be installed on a standalone server, or can be hosted on a cluster of nodes themselves inside a virtual machine (self-hosted engine). The frontend for engine can be accessed through a webadmin portal for administration, or a user portal with privileges, and features that can be fine tuned. An oVirt node is a server running RHEL, CentOS or Fedora, with KVM hypervisor enabled and a VDSM (Virtual Desktop and Server Manager) daemon started. VDSM controls all resources available to the node (compute, storage, networking) and virtual machines running on it and is also responsible for providing feedback to the engine about all initiated operations.

Testing was done on my Dell PowerEdge R620, the following image was used:

ovirt-node-ng-installer-ovirt-4.2-2018092806.iso

Installation

Insert the oVirt Node boot media into the machine and reboot (or power on) the machine, booting from the inserted media.

From the boot menu, select Install oVirt Node.

If kernel parameters are required you can press <TAB>, separating parameters by a space.

After booting into the installation select the language that is appropriate and Continue.

Click on Date & Time and select a time zone then click Done.

Click on Keyboard and select a keyboard then click Done.

Partitioning

Mountpoint	Size	Volume Group	Logical Volume	Type
/boot/efi	256M	—	—	EFI
/boot	256M	—	—	Standard
swap	8G	natasha	swap	LVM
/	48G	natasha	root	LVM

Click on Installation Destination.

From this screen, select the local standard disk you wish you install oVirt Node to.

Select I will configure partitioning under Other Storage Options then click Done.

Remove existing partitions if needed. Then click on the automatically configure partitions text at the top.

Resize the root (/) partition to 64 GiB.

Rename the volume group to the hostname of the machine.

Create a new partition for /ovirt/images (ISO storage domain) sized to 64 GiB.

Then use the rest of the space to create a new partition for /ovirt/data (DATA storage domain).

Click Done.

Finalize Installation

Click on Begin Installation in the bottom right.

Click Root Password in order to set the password for the root account.

Once the installation is finished click on Reboot.