Re: Virtualization platform choice

Nataraj <incoming-centos@xxxxxxx> · Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:23:49 -0700

    On 03/27/2011 07:10 AM, Steve Thompson wrote:

      On Sun, 27 Mar 2011, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

        How did you get the PXE working?

      I already had a PXE server for physical hosts, so I just did a 
virt-install with the --pxe switch, and it worked first time. The MAC 
address was pre-defined and known to the DHCP server. I installed both 
Linux and Windows guests with PXE.

        And do you have widgets for setting up the necessary bridged
networking?

      I edited the ifcfg-eth0 file on the host and added an ifcfg-br0, all by 
hand, and then rebooted. I didn't have to think about it again.

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:
 	DEVICE=eth0
 	HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

 	BRIDGE=br0
 	NM_CONTROLLED=0

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-br0:
 	DEVICE=br0
 	TYPE=Bridge
 	BOOTPROTO=static
 	BROADCAST=<braddr>
 	IPADDR=<ipaddr>
 	NETMASK=<netmask>
 	NETWORK=<network>

For each guest, something like this was used:

     <interface type='bridge'>
       <mac address='52:54:00:1d:58:cf'/>
       <source bridge='br0'/>
       <model type='virtio'/>
     </interface>

Steve
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    I setup a pxe boot server based on the instructions found here. 
      https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PXEInstallMultiDistro It
    works fine for both physical machines and kvm VM's.  My pxeboot
    server is running under ubuntu 10.04.2 in a kvm vm.  If your pxeboot
    server needs to run under Redhat/CentOS, then you'll need to
    locate/install the packages mentioned on this web page, which should
    be pretty straight forward.

    Note the pxeboot server works fine for the install CDs and DVD's for
    all of the distributions that I've tried, Redhat, Fedora and
    Ubuntu.  To boot live CDs I believe you need to convert the entire
    image into a tftp boot image which I think can be done using the
    fedora live cd creator tool (maybe it's in redhat now as well).

    I make the CD/DVD image available via NFS.  On the PXE host I simply
    mount the ISO image under the NFS /export directory.  Most of the
    install distributions provide the tftp images for pxeboot.  On the
    redhat 6 CD you'll find vmlinuz and initrd.img in the
    /images/pxeboot directory.

    I just recently installed kvm virtualization on several redhat 6
    hosts and one under Scientific Linux.  The latest version of
    virt-manager (with recent updates installed) now supports setup of
    bridge devices from the GUI.  You'll want to make sure to use virtio
    for performance and to disable the tso and gso tcp offload functions
    present in many ethernet cards which I do with the upstart script
    listed below.

    I am so far quite happy with kvm and happy to be able to run my
    management interface under linux instead of windows.

    #disable-tcpoffload - upstart script to modify tcp offload config for virtualization
#

description "disable-tcpoffload"

start on started rc RUNLEVEL=[2345]
stop on stopped rc RUNLEVEL=[!2345]

task

console output
# env INIT_VERBOSE

script
	set +e
	for interface in eth0 eth1 eth2 eth3; do
		/sbin/ethtool -K $interface gso off
		/sbin/ethtool -K $interface tso off
	done
end script

Nataraj

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