Oracle XPS The Netherlands On HA

Today, I have tested the new Oracle VM Management capabilities that Enterprise Manager Grid Control (EMGC) 10.2.0.5 has.

The existing Oracle VM Manager, is rather quick and light weight, so you will probably think why do we need EMGC for that.

Well, think about the following advantages:
- All in one management console
- EMGC runs also on Windows, so now you can manage Oracle VM from windows, which was not possible before
- You can set thresholds
- Use the Single Sign On that EMGC has
- Use the security features EMGC has
- Setting notifications and alerts so that admins can manage on exception basis.
- Context based flows (even if manual currently).
For example, change the vCPU on para-virtualized linux guests if database diagnostics (ADDM) suggests additional CPU
- Specific EM features like Configuration compare, search, policies for host and hypervisor. The policies can span multiple tiers and can be user defined. Example, do not run mixed workloads (database and middleware) on the same Hypervisor.
- Guest patching with integration with Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN)

Some quick requirements had to be filled in before I could begin:
- install a one-off patch to the OMS (patch 8244731)
- install VnCViewer into $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/OC4J_EM/applications/em/em
- also had to be sure Oracle VM Agent was updated to version 2.2-70 or higher.

This all went smoothly. Please note that it makes sense to install the patch and the VnCViewer at the same time when the OMS is down.

Please read note 781879.1 for full details (as information may change and there is only one singe source of truth)

First I had to create a server pool. After creating a server pool, it was just a matter of making the Oracle VM Server aware of the Vm images I already had on disk.

And exactly for this was an option, which you can see in the capture below.

This is the place where you can see all the VM Images discovered in your virtual server pool.
After this, it is just a matter of selecting the images and "importing" them into your vm "admin" page.

From here you can do the usual; start, stop, pause, suspend, clone and get to the console.

To me this seems a new step taken for EMGC to be the complete management framework.

Rene Kundersma
Oracle Expert Services, The Netherlands

Basis for Bare Metal Provisioning (BMP) in EMGC 10.2.0.5 is as mentioned in an earlier blog entry "PXE boot".


This blog entry describes how to setup PXE boot (TFTP and DHCP) for a para-virtualised guests.
This allows you to automatically install virtualised guests by kickstart file.

By the way, in this setup I am on OEl 5U2 x86, if you want to reproduce for say x86_64, you may need other packages.

Below are my notes of the setup:
- install dhcp-3.0.5-18.el5
- install tftp-0.42-3.1.0.1 (we need this one later a required package for pypxeboot)
- install tftp-server-0.42-3.1.0.1

After installation of these packages, we begin with the configuration of dhcp in /etc/dhcpd.conf.
As this is just a test I am not using all options for DHCP.
Be care full if you test this, DHCP be working too good...

#
# DHCP Server Configuration file.
#   see /usr/share/doc/dhcp*/dhcpd.conf.sample  
#
ddns-update-style none;
allow booting; 
allow bootp;   

subnet 192.168.200.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
    option routers             192.168.200.1;
    option subnet-mask         255.255.255.0;
    option nis-domain          "nl.oracle.com";
    option domain-name         "nl.oracle.com";
    option domain-name-servers 192.135.82.60;

    default-lease-time 60;
    max-lease-time 60;
 
    next-server 192.168.200.173;
    filename "/pxelinux.0";

    host RK{
    hardware ethernet 00:16:3e:62:39:d3;
    fixed-address 192.168.200.177;
    }
}

As you can see I specified subnet, netmask, domain-name and details for the host called "RK".
Details are: name, mac and ip address.

The purpose of the "next-server" is to specify the name (or ip) of the tftp-server.
It makes sense to put DHCP and TFTP server on the same box.

In order to (re)start dhcp:

service dhcpd restart 

After setting up DHCP, TFTP needs to be setup. This is just a matter of enabling the service in inetd.
Set disable = no in the file /etc/xinetd.d/tftp. After this, restart service xinetd.

Pxeboot files need to be copied to /tftpboot on the tftp-server:

cp /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /tftpboot/
cp /usr/lib/syslinux/mboot.c32 /tftpboot/

From your OEL distribution, copy the boot-installation files:

cp $MOUNT_OEL_DISTR/images/xen/* /tftpboot/

Create a PXE configuration file for the guest you want to start:

[root@gridnode03 pxelinux.cfg]# gethostip -x 192.168.200.177
C0A8C8B1

So for a guest with ip-number 192.168.200.177 we need to put the details for the PV-PXE installation into /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/C0A8C8B1

[root@gridnode03 ~]# cat /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/C0A8C8B1 
default linux
prompt 1
timeout 120
label linux
  kernel vmlinuz
  append initrd=initrd.img lang=en_US keymap=us \
  ks=nfs:192.168.200.200:/vol/vol1/distrib/linux32/workshop-ovs/oel/OEL5U2/ks.cfg \  
  ksdevice=eth0 ip=dhcp

You can see:
- my OEL kickstart-file is on NFS (as my installation)
- the ip number is obtained by ip using eth0

I created my kickstart from an existing OEL installation.
With the help of the command system-config-kickstart --generate I re-generated it.

After this, I had to modify some bits about installation media (from cdrom to nfs).
Specifics for my kickstart file here

See the Redhat site for all options of kickstart.

Before I could start a vm guest I also, had to:
- install pypxeboot and
- install udhcp-0.9.8-1usermac

Then, created a vm configuration file:

[root@nlhpblade07 pxe]# cat rk.cfg 
name = "RK"
memory = "1024"
disk = [ 'file:/OVS/running_pool/pxe/system.img,xvda,w',]
vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:62:39:d3,bridge=xenbr0', '', ]
vfb = ["type=vnc,vncunused=1,vnclisten=0.0.0.0"]
#bootloader="/usr/bin/pygrub"
bootloader="/usr/bin/pypxeboot"
bootargs=vif[0]
vcpus=1
on_reboot   = 'restart'
on_crash    = 'restart'

Before I could start the VM, the 'disk' (image) had to be in place:

[root@nlhpblade07 pxe]# dd if=/dev/zero of=system.img bs=1M count=8000
8000+0 records in
8000+0 records out
8388608000 bytes (8.4 GB) copied, 165.725 seconds, 50.6 MB/s
[root@nlhpblade07 pxe]# 

So, after starting, remember that the third console of the installation enables you to see what is going on during the run of the anaconda installation procedure:

After installation and before the reboot the vm-config file had to be modified and looks like this:

[root@nlhpblade07 pxe]# cat rk.cfg
name = "RK"
memory = "1024"
disk = [ 'file:/OVS/running_pool/pxe/system.img,xvda,w',]
vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:62:39:d3,bridge=xenbr0', '', ]
vfb = ["type=vnc,vncunused=1,vnclisten=0.0.0.0"]
bootloader="/usr/bin/pygrub"
vcpus=1
on_reboot   = 'restart'
on_crash    = 'restart'

After a successful installation the OS is setup and ready to be used: Rene Kundersma
Oracle Expert Services, The Netherlands