openSUSE on KVM

Most recent guest OS on my RHEL KVM/Qemu setup:






OpenSUSE 11.2 with KDE 4.3. Initial impression is that KDE is pretty slick, but quite different from what I'm used to, back the days of KDE 2 and 3. In terms of usability, it definitely has a learning curve. I'm definitely partial to the simple elegance of Gnome, but I intend to play a bit more with OpenSUSE and KDE.

Playing DVDs on RHEL5

As a consultant, one critical functionality on my laptop is the ability to watch DVDs- as trivial as it sounds, my laptop serves more than just the sole purpose of a work tool. Outside of work, it's my portal to the world, including personal e-mail, online television, and watching movies. Since I'm staying in hotels 4-5 days a week, I don't have the option to go home to my desktop every day after work. My firm understands this, and while the work laptop is primarily for work, the official policy allows us to use our laptops for "limited personal use," which I believe is the right approach- its more of a quality of life factor than anything else.

So after installing RHEL5 as my primary OS and virtualizing my work OS on KVM (whether this falls under "limited personal use" is somewhat murky :-), I needed to ensure that I could still watch movies on the laptop. Unfortunately unlike Ubuntu, Fedora, or Gentoo, RHEL does not have a robust media offering in the standard supported repositories. One reason being that RHEL is really designed for enterprise use, so generally, DVD playback and media handling is unnecessary. Another reason for RHEL's lack of official support for proprietary formats is due to patent and copyright issues- since RedHat markets and sells its OS and accompanying software, it cannot support potentially contentious packages such as libdvdcss.

Nonetheless, RHEL being Linux, I knew that I'd be able to install a DVD playing application, even if installed from source, however I wanted to avoid installing from source if possible simply because of dependency issues and having to write a seamless configuration file with all the right option flags set.

Since RHEL has its Fedora cousin and CentOS brother, I was confident that I could find the appropriate RPMs to install a media player. I also knew that I'd want to install xine, as I really like its simple interface, large support of proprietary and open formats, and I had had good experience with it in Ubuntu.

I began by installing the RHEL officially supported totem package as well as an rpm of libdvdcss. While both installed rather seamlessly, it appeared that totem either couldn't find or couldn't use the libdvdcss plugin. I then tried installing xine from custom packages, but this proved unsuccesfuly with too many unresolved dependencies. After a bit of googling, this Linux Questions forum post directed me to Dag Wieers (Dutch?) repository, which included Dag's custom yum repository with packages created for RHEL5. Once on the site, installation was relatively painless. To create the repository, only one command is necessary:

# rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

After that

# yum install xine

The xine package resolved all dependencies and installed cleanly, and sure enough, I can play commercial DVDs with no issues!

RHEL 5 and KVM for Enterprise Notebook

So after finally successfully downloading and burning RHEL 5 Client x86_64 and obtaining a new hard drive for my notebook, I'm ready to install RHEL and test KVM.

The RHEL install was relatively painless, as Anaconda is an amazingly simple installation utility. Unfortunately, the first road bump I ran into was that the RHEL Client installation disk does not come with any virtualization package options (Xen, KVM, etc). No worries though, I was sure I could simply find the packages on the RedHat Network and push them down that way.

Small problem: RHEL didn't recognize my wireless card. After a quick lspci and some grepping:

lspci | grep wireless

I found my card and a nice step-by-step guide to install the necessary firmware to get it working.

After getting wireless up and running, I found that after registering my RH system, it did not appear in my RedHat systems on RHN, therefore I couldn't target packages to be automatically pushed to my laptop. After a bit of research on the RedHat Knowledgebase, I determined that this was because of the way my enterprise evaluation account was set up- my systems would be assigned to the Organization Administrator. Being the impatient person I am, I decided to just pull down the necessary packages manually instead of waiting for a response from my company's RHEL partner contact.

It was a bit of a tedious process, as I had to not only pull down the necessary RPMs, but also their dependencies. Anyone who's had experience working with RedHat, SuSE, or any other RPM-based distro before yum became available knows how frustrating it can be. I actually documented each package I had to pull down and listed them in the original version of this post, however Blogger didn't do a good job of saving the post, so that list has been lost in the series of tubes.

After pulling down all the packages I needed (apparently RHEL only officially supports up to version 83 of KVM) and checking the Guest Support Status, it looked as though I'd be good to go with virtualizing Windows Vista or 7 on KVM.

The first thing I tried was to convert the VMWare VMDK virtual image of my Windows Vista laptop into qemu's qcow2 format, as outlined in a link from my previous post. I quickly discovered, however, that RHEL does not natively support reading/writing to NTFS filesystems. What!? What is this, 1998? After a bit of Googling, I found this NTFS support in RHEL 5 blog post outlining the basic packages needed. One thing to note is that the dev package (kmdl) is not necessary and will generate a compile-time error if your kernel is not 2.6.18. I went ahead and just skipped installing it and was able to mount ntfs file systems fine. I figured I'd try configuring the automounter later, after I got my converted Vista image converted:

qemu-img convert Vista.vmdk -O qcow2 /home//virtual_machines/Vista.qcow2

The conversion appeared to complete successfully, however it did take a good bit of time (roughly 30 minutes).

kvm -hda Ubuntu-copy.qcow2 -net nic -net user -m 512

Upon attempting to boot this image, I received a blank screen with no indication of the guestOS trying to boot. After a couple more attempts, I did get the "Windows failed to start properly" menu and tried booting into safe mode, however this too failed. No sweat, there's a chance that my virtual image didn't convert well in the P2V, and I haven't yet tested it on VMWare, so I figured why not start from scratch with a brand new Windows 7 image?

qemu-kvm -hda win7.img -cdrom win27.iso -m 1024 -boot d

Success! (at least initially...) The Win7 ISO booted up beautifully and actually relatively quickly. I was able to run through the initial steps to install Windows 7- selecting time zone settings, user settings, etc. That was until I got to the "Setup is Starting" screen and where I was left in indefinite purgatory. I did a bit of googling and found this bugzilla report outlining the same issue I was experiencing, but with no resolution. Tracing duplicate bugs led to no where, and thus again I was stymied.

Alright, well I don't really need Windows 7, why not just use XP Professional? Being an older OS, perhaps it would install more cleanly on KVM. As before, the ISO booted great, I ran through all the OS options, and it actually started to install... only to later hang just as its younger brother did before. After a few repeated attempts (one allowed to run overnight), it was obvious that there was little I could do to get a Windows OS up and running on this version of KVM.

Alright, well maybe the version packages I chose to install KVM were incomplete or still unstable. Afterall, the kvm-qemu package was listed as in Beta. So I decided to scrap my RHEL client idea and go for the real deal: RHEL 5 Server, whose installation media actually contains virtualization packages. Despite this more by-the-book (and probably more officially supported) attempt, I ran into identical problems as noted above

So the conclusion: KVM has potential as an alternative to a baremetal hypervisor, perhaps just not version 83. RedHat is striving to make RHEV (RedHat's implementation of KVM) a market contender for a low-cost virtualization solution, however it seems this may be a bit premature. Maybe they should give their internal developers a bit more time to design and test before selling that horse.

While the battle may be lost, the war is far from over- next attempt: the more tried and true Xen!

Packages: kvm-qemu-img

Links:
HowTos/KVM - CentOS
RHEL Virtualization Guide
(dev package not required- complains if kernel is different)

P2V of Vista machine failed

RedHat Certified Technician

I am officially a RedHat Certified Technician! Although I'm not gaining any experience in RedHat on my current project, I managed to get RedHat training approved by my firm, and took the RH133 course last week. The course was great- I learned a good deal of administration tips and tricks and it really helped fill in some crucial voids in my Linux repertoire.

I'm hoping to continue on the Red Hat path to obtain my RHCE in the next year, hopefully in October if possible. Admittedly, Gentoo still holds a special place in my heart, but in terms of usability and enterprise server-grade Linux, Red Hat has gained a lot of points in my book, particularly with its implementation yum and system configuration tools.

The class also inspired me to take a closer look at Xen and KVM virtualization. I'm hoping to P2V my Windows 7 box at home, and instead use RHEL (or CentOS) as a hypervisor and run Windows 7 as a VM.

RH courses I'm hoping to attend (and gain certification in) in the coming months include:

• RH253 - Red Hat Linux Network and Security Administration
• RH318 - Red Hat Virtualization Administration