KVM and Condor (Part 1): Creating the virtual machine.

My next topic of discussion which will be a two part blog is regarding launching a Virtual Machine (VM) in a Condor environment.  In the first of these two blogs I will share the steps that I took to create a VM that I will launch as a job in Condor.

I will be using Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) implementation for Linux Guests.  KVM is a full virtualization framework which can run multiple unmodified guests including various flavors of Microsoft Windows, Linux Operating Systems and other UNIX family systems. In order to see the types of Guest operating systems and platforms that KVM supports you can look at http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Guest_Support_Status

Let’s get started. For this blog the host system on which I am working is running CentOS  6.0 with Linux 2.6.32 on a x86_64 platform.  I will be creating a CentOS 5.6 image for the VM guest.  As the first step, I will get my host system ready with KVM tools and other dependencies. To do this I require a package called kvm  – this package includes the VM kernel module. In addition to the kvm package I will be using three tools (viz. virt-install, virsh,  and virt-viewer) from toolkit called libvirt. Libvirt (http://libvirt.org/) is a hypervisor-independent API that is able to interact with the virtualization capabilities of various operating systems. The commands below show you how to use yum to install kvm and libvirt related packages:

yum install kvm

yum install virt-manager libvirt libvirt-python python-virtinst libvirt-client

I am now ready to create the VM by using the following command:

   1:  virt-install \

   2:  --name=vm56-25GB \

   3:  --disk path=/home/aguru/myvms/vm5.6-25GB.img,sparse=true,size=25 \

   4:  --ram=2048 \

   5:  --location=http://mirror.unl.edu/centos/5.6/os/x86_64/ \

   6:  --os-type=linux  \

   7:  --vnc

In the above code snippet 'virt-install' is a libvirt command line tool for provisioning new virtual machines. The different options that I have used above are explained below
--name is the name of the new machine that I am creating
--disk option specifies the absolute path of the virtual machine image (file) that will be created. The ‘sparse’ option in the same line means that the host system does not have to allocate all the space up-front, and the ‘size’ gives the size of the hard disk drive of the VM in GB
--ram is the RAM of guest in MB
--location  using this option I am providing a location for network install where the OS install files for the guest are located
--os-type specifies type of guest operating system
--vnc specifies to setup a virtual console in the guest and export it as a VNC server in host

Unless there are any missing dependencies and tools that somehow did not get installed correctly - your install should start with a new VNC window popping up on your display. I have a few screen captures of what you may see shown below.

** Just a quick note - to release the mouse cursor from the VNC window you can use Ctrl-Alt.

 
















and so on with finally a screen as below





On the final screen of installation you can click the 'Reboot' button from the VM window to restart the guest VM.

Few basic commands to list, start and stop a VM

virsh list –all

The output of virsh list --all shows the defined VMs and their current state for e.g. a typical output may look like:

Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
- vm56-15KSGB          shut off
- vm56-25GB            shut off

In order to start a VM from the shut off state issue a virsh start command. Note below that the virsh list –all now shows an Id and the running state of the VM (vm56-15KSGB)

virsh start vm56-15KSGB

virsh list --all
Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
1 vm56-15KSGB          running
- vm56-25GB            shut off 

To launch a VNC console for displaying the console of a running VM you can use virt-viewer e.g.

virt-viewer  1

And finally, to shutdown a running VM use virsh shutdown or force a virsh destroy e.g.

virsh shutdown 1

or

virsh destroy 1

Both virt-viewer and virsh shutdown take the Id of the running VM as an argument.

What if I have a Kickstart file for the VM I want to create?

In case you have a Kickstart file that you will like to use for creating the VM you may use the following command:

   1:  virt-install \

   2:  --name=vm56-15KSGB \

   3:  --disk path=/home/aguru/myvms/vm56-15KSGB.img,sparse=true,size=15 \

   4:  --ram=2048 \

   5:  --location=http://newman.ultralight.org/os/centos/5.5/x86_64 \

   6:  --os-type=linux  \

   7:  --vnc \

   8:  -x "ks=http://httpdserver.hosting.kickstart/pathto.kickstart.file"

The only thing to note which is additional in this virt-install command as compared to its previous  use in this blog is the extra flag '–x '. The value passed along with the -x flag points to the location of the web location of the kickstart file.

That is it all for this post. In the next post I will talk about using this created image and then launching it in a Condor VM Universe.