OPS235 Lab 3 - Fedora17

Using Virtual Machines

Objectives

• Understand Virtualization
• Use KVM virtualization on Fedora
• Use a variety of installation methods
  • Live Image Installation
  • Network Installation
  • Kickstart Installation

Reference Material

Virtualization

• Fedora 12 Virtualization Guide

Installation Methods

• Live Image Installation
  • Fedora 12 Live Image Guide
  • Fedora 12 Installation Quick Start Guide
• Network Installation
  • Fedora 12 Installation Guide
    • Preparing for a Network Installation
    • Performing a Network Installation
• Kickstart Installation
  • Fedora 12 Installation Guide
    • Automating the Installation with Kickstart
    • Kickstart Installations
    • Kickstart Configurator

Required Materials

• Removable disk pack with Fedora installed (see Lab 2).

Introduction

A virtual machine is a software simulation of a computer which can be used as though it were actual hardware. It's possible to run multiple virtual machines on one computer, reducing hardware requirements and introducing flexibility. Some common uses of virtualization include:

• Software testing -- Using multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer for testing and experimentation.
• Network simulation -- Testing network services, protocols, and security scenarios with a small number of computers.
• Isolation -- Protecting multiple sets of data by storing them on multiple virtual machines.
• Server consolidation -- Reducing the number of physical servers in a network by moving physical machines to virtual machines. This saves hardware, administration, cooling, and electricity costs, and it can increase the utilization of hardware (by ensuring that the hardware is not under-loaded).
• Load-balancing and disaster recovery -- It is possible to migrate virtual machines between different physical machines, to ensure that a workload is balanced across multiple computers, to allow routine hardware maintenance and upgrading, and to compensate for hardware failure or other disasters.

In this lab, you will create three virtual machines. This also gives you an opportunity to experiment with different ways of installing Fedora. Later in this course you will install another operating system distribution in a virtual machines.

You have already used a Fedora live disc and an installation disc. In both cases, the boot media (which you used to load the installation software) and the installation source (where the software that got installed came from) were the same: they CD/DVD provided both. However, the Fedora (and most other Linux distributions) permits you to use any combination of boot media and installation media:

• Boot Media
  • CD or DVD
  • Hard disk
  • USB flash drive
  • Network boot

• Installation source
  • CD or DVD
  • Hard disk
  • USB flash drive
  • Network HTTP or NFS software repository

When you installed Fedora in Lab 2, you did it interactively -- you manually specified all of the installation options, and then the installation process was started. This is fairly convenient for single-machine installations, but is time-consuming and possibly error-prone when repeated for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of machines.

For large installations, it's possible to specify the installation options in a file so that no user intervention is required. This is called a kickstart installation.

Instructions

Preparation

Update your Fedora Installation
It's a good idea to ensure that your Fedora installation is fully updated before proceeding. You can update your system with the graphical tool located on the menu at >System>Administration>Software Update (or type the command gpk-update-view), or by typing either of these commands: pkcon update or yum update

1. Install the Fedora virtualization software: yum groupinstall "Virtualization" or pkcon install @virtualization The virtualization software installed is in three parts:
   1. A system service named libvirtd that manages the VMs.
   2. Tools to manage virtualization, including the virt-manager graphical tool and the virsh command-line tool.
   3. The actual virtual machines themselves.
2. Start the virtualization service: service libvirtd start
3. Start the graphical tool by selecting the menu option Applications>System Tools>Virtual Machine Manager or by typing the command virt-manager