Oracle VM post-install check list

Following my experience with OracleVM, I am adding my post-install steps for your pleasure. These steps are not mandatory, by design, but will help you get up and running faster and easier. These steps are relevant to Oracle VM 2.2, but might work for older (and newer) versions as well.

Define bonding

You should read more about it in my past post.

Define storage multipathing

You can read about it here.

Define NTP

Define NTP servers for your Oracle VM host. Make sure the daemon ‘ntpd’ is running, and following an initial time update, via

ntpdate -u <server>

to set the clock right initially, perform a sync to the hardware clock, for good measures

hwclock –systohc

Make sure NTPD starts on boot:

chkconfig ntpd on

Install Linux VM

If the system is going to be stand-alone, you might like to run your VM Manager on it (we will deal with issues of it later). To do so, you will need to install your own Linux machine, since Oracle supplied image fails (or at least – failed for me!) for no apparent reason (kernel panic, to be exact, on a fully MD5 checked image). You could perform this action from the command line by running the command

virt-install -n linux_machine -r 1024 -p –nographics -l nfs://iso_server:/mount

This directive installs a VM called “linux_machine” from nfs iso_server:/mount, with 1GB RAM. You will be asked about where to place the VM disk, and you should place it in /OVS/running_pool/linux_machine , accordingly.

It assumes you have DHCP available for the install procedure, etc.

Install Oracle VM Manager on the virtual Linux machine

This should be performed if you select to manage your VMs from a VM. This is a bit tricky, as you are recommended not to do so if you designing HA-enabled server pool.

Define autostart to all your VMs

Or, at least, those you want to auto start. Create a link from /OVS/running_pool/<VM_NAME>/vm.cfg to /etc/xen/auto/

The order in which ‘ls’ command will see them in /etc/xen/auto/ is the order in which they will be called.

Disable or relocate auto-suspending

Auto-suspend is cool, but your default Oracle VM installation has shortage of space under /var/lib/xen/save/ directory, where persistent memory dumps are kept.  On a 16GB RAM system, this can get pretty high, which is far more than your space can contain.

Either increase the size (mount something else there, I assume), or edit /etc/sysconfig/xendomains and comment the line  with the directive XENDOMAINS_SAVE= . You could also change the desired path to somewhere you have enough space on.

Hashing this directive will force regular shutdown to your VMs following a power off/reboot command to the Oracle VM.

Make sure auto-start VMs actually start

This is an annoying bug. For auto-start of VMs, you need /OVS up and available. Since it’s OCFS2 file system, it takes a short while (being performed by ovs-agent).

Since ovs-agent takes a while, we need to implement a startup script after it and before xendomains. Since both are markes “S99” (check /etc/rc3.d/ for details), we would add a script called “sleep”.

The script should be placed in /etc/init.d/

#!/bin/bash
#
# sleep     Workaround Oracle VM delay issues
#
# chkconfig: 2345 99 99
# description: Adds a predefined delay to the initialization process
#

DELAY=60

case "$1" in
start) sleep $DELAY
;;
esac
exit 0

Place the script as a file called “sleep” (omit the suffix I added in this post), set it to be executable, and then run

chkconfig –add sleep

This will solve VM startup problems.

Fix /etc/hosts file

If you are into multi-server pool, you will need that the host name would not be defined to 127.0.0.1 address. By default, Oracle VM defines it to match 127.0.0.1, which will result in a poor attempt to create multi-server pool.

This is all I have had in mind for now. It should solve most new-comer issues with Oracle VM, and allow you to make good use of it. It’s a nice system, albeit it’s ugly management.

Update the OracleVM

You could use Oracle’s unbreakable network, if you are a paying customer, or you could use the Public Yum Server for your system.

Updates to Oracle VM Manager

If you won’t use Oracle Grid Control (Enterprise Manager) to manage the pool, you will probably use Oracle VM Manager. You would need to update the ovs-console package, and you will probably want to add tightvnc-java package, so that IE users will be able to use the web-based VNC services. You would better grub these packages from here.