At VeeamON, we announced that Veeam would soon release Backup for RHV. In a subsequent post, I wrote down some of the observations I had seen over the past few months talking to customers and partners who have chosen to go down the KVM/Red Hat Virtualisation path also outlining some of the improvements with the a quickly maturing KVM virtualisation stack. At the centre of that stack is HostedEngine, which powers oVIRT. This is what is driving the uptick in KVM interest. At the time, I had got working a homelab single host instance of KVM with oVirt up and running for some labbing, but is was a very painful experience to say the least. With that, I wanted to revisit the install and document the steps taken to get to a working NestedESXi lab environment.

In Part 1, I covered the deployment and configuration of a single host KVM server… and in part 2, I covered the Hosted Engine install that runs oVirt as done through Cockpit.

I wanted to quickly follow that up by showing the command line way to achieve the oVirt Engine deployment and configuration.

Installing with hosted-engine Command:

The oVirt Engine runs as a virtual machine on self-hosted engine nodes (specialized hosts) in the same environment it manages. A self-hosted engine environment requires one less physical server, but requires more administrative overhead to deploy and manage. The Engine is highly available without external HA management.

The minimum setup of a self-hosted engine environment includes one oVirt Engine virtual machine that is hosted on the self-hosted engine nodes. The Engine Appliance is used to automate the installation of an Enterprise Linux 8 virtual machine, and the Engine on that virtual machine. The self-hosted engine installation uses Ansible and the Engine Appliance (a pre-configured Engine virtual machine image) to automate the installation tasks. End to end, this took about 30-40 minutes on my home setup with the VMs living on high speed NVMe datastores.

There are a couple of ways to install and configure oVIRT with the Hosted Engine setup. The example below shows how to do it through Cockpit.

Before the oVIRT setup can begin, a few things need to be configured and installed from the KVM Host cli.

The commands above will add the oVirt rpm to the system, enable a few required packages and tools as well as PostGreSQL.

From here, for a self contained KVM host, we can run the hosted-engine –deploy command to trigger the initial configuration steps.

Compared to the CockPit HostedEngine configuration process, this to me is a little more streamlined. Lots of the steps are default options, but the same settings need to be entered. Outside of the [Default Options] Below is a list of what I needed to configure as part of the CLI deployment.

So, for the CLI config, there is a total of eight (8) items to enter! Much more steamlined!

Below is the full (unedited) end to end install as performed on my Homelab running the VM on a top of the line NVMe. You can see that it still took 40 minutes to complete the process… but if you skip through, you get a good look at what is happening with the Ansible Playbook orchestrating the whole thing.