Everything Under Control

Integrating Local VMs into System Management

Finally, you will now want to install the openQRM client on the new virtual machine. It provides an interface between the operating system on the virtual machine and the openQRM host server. This gives you an easy approach for integrating local virtual machines into your openQRM system management – and thus, for example, enabling monitoring of a virtual machine with Nagios, configuration management with Puppet, or shell access to the virtual machine using SSH. Download the openQRM client from the Plugins Misc | local-server | Local VMs and copy it to the virtual machine:

scp openqrm-local-vm-client root@IP-der-VM:/root

To install the client, use SSH to log on to the virtual machine; change to the /root directory, and make the client executable:

chmod +x openqrm-local-vm-client

You can then start the installation by typing:

./openqrm-local-vm-client

Missing packages are automatically downloaded and installed in the background. After completing the client installation, you can then use SSH Term (Secure Shell in the browser window) to access your Linux virtual machines or add virtual machines to system management with Nagios. To do so, click on the corresponding buttons with the plus signs in the server list on the dashboard.

Note that you can use the same approach to add physical or virtual (Linux) servers that already exist on the network to your openQRM management. They then appear as new resources on the dashboard and can be used, for example, as additional storage servers.

To do this, copy the client below /usr/share/openqrm/plugins/local-server/bin/openqrm-local-server to the existing Linux host and run:

scp /usr/share/openqrm/plugins/ local-server/bin/openqrm-local-server root@VM:/tmp
ssh VM /tmp/openqrm-local-server integrate -u openqrm -p openqrm -q 192.168.0.30 -i eth0 [-s http/https]

The IP address 192.168.0.30 belongs to the openQRM server in this example.

Virtualizing Windows with KVM

Of course, you can install Windows on a virtual KVM machine. To do so, you need to enable the virtualization extensions (VT-X) on the physical openQRM host. If you applied the default setting of virtio when creating a virtual machine, Windows also needs additional drivers for the VirtIO SCSI controller before it can identify a local disk during the installation.

The driver, along with the driver for the VirtIO Ethernet adapter (also necessary), is available from a driver collection belonging to the Fedora project. Download the latest ISO of the collection [4] and mount it in your virtual machine's configuration as a second CD-ROM drive. The Windows virtual machine will then boot from the first CD-ROM drive, and you can load the drivers from the second when prompted to do so by Windows Setup.

Once Windows is installed on the virtual machine, you will definitely want to install the openQRM Enterprise Windows plugin, which gives you the tools required to prepare the Windows operating system for cloning and snapshots in openQRM. These Windows master images, created with Sysprep, can then be cloned multiple times and used for cloud deployments, for example.

After installing the Windows plugins via the plugin manager, you will see that the openqrm-client.exe client is available for downloading below the Plugins Deployment | Windows option. The easiest approach is to run the openQRM web interface with the browser on a virtual Windows machine. To do this, again use the noVNC plugin to access a virtual machine. Save the client in the top-level directory, C:\, and call the group policy editor, gpedit.msc.

In the editor, now add the openqrm-client.exe file as a start script: Local computer policies | Computer configuration | Software settings | Windows settings | Scripts (Start/Shutdown) | Start . As the start parameter, again enter the IP address of the openQRM server.

Sysprep and Generalized Images

To be able to provide the Windows image you created automatically to other virtual machines later on, now launch sysprep.exe and create another generalized Windows image. To do this, download the unattend.xml configuration file from tht Plugins Deployment | Windows option onto the administrator desktop and enter a complex password in the Administrator keyword | Value section. This password will be the administrator password for the automatic Windows installation later on.

Before you launch Sysprep, it is a good idea to defrag the virtual machine's hard disk first. It can use the built-in Windows tool defrag.exe to do so; after completing defragmentation, open a Windows command shell with administrative rights and run the following in the shell:

C:\Windows\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /generalize /oobe /shutdown /unattend:C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\unattend.xml

After completing the Sysprep action, the Windows system shuts down, and the Windows image is ready for cloning, or the snapshot is ready for further cloud deployments (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Running sysprep.