This is a collections of "HOWTO's" useful for spot learning.

Storage

Q. How do I specify a storage location that can be used by all provisioning operations that occur in a Server Pool ?

A. ConVirt allows you to set a bunch of information associated with a Server Pool. This information takes precedence at the time of provisioning an new VM in the Server Pool. For using this feature to specify the central store,

• Select the Server Pool
• Right mouse click to get to the context menu
• Select Settings...
• Enter VM_DISKS_DIR as name and /mnt/shared/class_a_storage as the value.

From now on, when you provision the image on to this Server Pool, the disks for the VM would get created at /mnt/shared/class_a_storage location.

Q. I want to use LVMs as disks for my VMs. How do I create new LVM partitions when I provision new VMs ?

A. With ConVirt, it is easy to use LVM partitions for the providing storage for new VMs. Lets take the Linux_CD_install image that ships with ConVirt and tweak it to use LVMs instead of file based storage.

• Click on Linux_CD_install image and choose Edit Settings.
• Select the disk and click on the Properties.
  • A new dialog with disk details would show up, change the type from file/VBD to phy.
  • Press ok to save the information
• Now switch to the Provisioning tab
  • change hda_disk_type from VBD to LVM
  • change VM_DISKS_DIR to point to the Volume group from which the new logical volumes would get created. For example : /dev/MY_VG
  • Press ok to save the changes
• Select the image and provision it as you would normally, with the name say "debian_test"
  • you should see the debian_test.disk.xm logical volume created under /dev/MY_VG
  • Your debian_test vm is now set up to use the newly created /dev/MY_VG/debian_test.disk.xm volume.

Q. How do I use iSCSI and AOE with ConVirt?

A.

For Ubuntu 8.10 (and maybe other distributives)

If there would be problems with ISCSI check that ISCSI is properly configured:

sudo iscsiadm -m discovery now substitute ISCSI-SERVER-IP-ADDRESS with IP address from above command: sudo iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p ISCSI-SERVER-IP-ADDRESS sudo /etc/init.d/open-iscsi restart

Automation

Q. How do I send and email to a particular address when a provisioning operations is done ?

A.