Rolling Out RHV-M with Cockpit

The Machine Manager can now be rolled out in RHV as an appliance directly from the dashboard of an RHVH node; this is known as the Hosted Engine setup. Simply click on Virtualization | Hosted Engine | Hosted Engine Setup Start , which automatically starts the deployment of RHV-M and sets up a hosted engine RHV-M as a VM on the hypervisor.

Red Hat provides the appliance as a download; you can accelerate the deployment if you previously install the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) package on the RHVH host. The Hosted Engine setup automatically finds a locally available OVA but also downloads from the Internet if it fails to do so. The Hosted Engine setup also supports a hyperconverged setup on the basis of GlusterFS.

Administrator Portal

Once the Manager and host are set up, the next step is to access the Administrator Portal with the admin account to complete the setup, including configuring clusters, hosts, storage, and networks. The first thing you will notice is that Red Hat has expanded the system dashboard – not to be confused with the dashboard in Cockpit – which provides a quick overview of the system health state. You can access it in the first tab on the left (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The dashboard of a newly installed system: The status line at the bottom can be expanded to let you scroll through all the events.

By clicking New in the Hosts tab, you can add hosts. Alternatively, you can use Foreman/Satellite very conveniently to fetch the required SSH fingerprint by pressing Fetch in Enter host fingerprint or fetch manually from host , assuming that the DNS/FQDN name is correct. The new host then appears in the Status column with the status Installing , and you can track there how the missing packages (e.g., VDSM) are installed and launched. The status then changes to Up .

Identity Management

In the course of the installation, the Virtualization Manager creates the admin user in the internal domain. The admin@internal account is primarily used for the initial configuration of the environment and for troubleshooting. RHV supports all major directory services, in addition to Red Hat Identity Management (IdM) – that is, FreeIPA, Active Directory (AD), OpenLDAP, Red Hat Directory Server (RHDS), and a few others.

After setting up the preferred directory service, you can retire the admin user. However, the configuration of the directory services, like many other aspects in RHV/RHEL and unlike VMware vSphere, takes place outside of the GUI. OpenLDAP, for example, can be installed on the Virtualization Manager by typing:

yum install ovirt-engine-extension-aaa-ldap-setup

Setting up IdM on the same machine is not possible, however, because IdM is not compatible with the mod_ssl package required by RHV-M. The related IdM client is named ipa-client , by the way, and is included in the rhel-7-server-rpms channel but conflicts with the IPA client/server packages of the same name from free sources (FreeIPA).

An Identity Manager should be run externally, anyway. Getting IPA or AD to cooperate with the role model implemented by RHV is easy. In RHV-M, define which AD/IPA groups are given what level of access in RHV. For IPA integration, the simplest case is to give the ipausers group admin rights. This means that all IPA users can manage RHV.