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 also then covered the command line way to achieve the oVirt Engine deployment and configuration.

In this final post, I wanted to quickly show the process to upgrade the oVirt Engine. As is so happens, oVirt 4.4.7 was released as of July 06, 2021 and provided a good opportunity to go through the upgrade.

Upgrading Self Hosted Engine via Command:

The oVirt Engine runs as a virtual machine on self-hosted engine nodes (specialized hosts) in the same environment it manages. 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.

Once installed and configured, when a new build is available, the process below can be followed to complete the upgrade process.

  • Update KVM Host
  • Put Hosted Engine into Maintenance Mode and check to ensure that’s been done
  • Enter the Hosted Engine OS Command Line
  • Run the Hosted Engine Check
  • Update oVirt
  • Run the Engine Setup and go through the options (I used all defaults)
  • Update the Hosted Engine OS

Below is the full (unedited) end to end upgrade as performed on my Homelab. The upgrade took about 10 minutes to complete.

References:

https://www.ovirt.org/release/4.4.7/