Hello, and welcome to this presentation on creating a virtual machine in Oracle Linux
Virtualization Manager.
In this video, you will learn to identify the physical, logical and virtual components
needed to create virtual machines.
To identify the tool used to access a virtual machine console from the Administration Portal.
You will learn the steps for creating a virtual machine using the Oracle Linux Virtualization
Manager Administration Portal.
And how to start the new virtual machine and access its console.
Before creating a virtual machine, or VM, in Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, there
must be an environment configured with the components needed to host and support the
creation of VMs.
Our environment has KVM compute hosts supplying the hardware resources and the virtualization
software a virtual machine needs to run.
It also has storage domains holding the resources from which virtual machines can start.
And, we have a virtualized network for private and public communication to our virtual machines.
To access the console for any virtual machines created, we need a tool that displays the
VM console.
Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager uses the virt-viewer package for remote console access.
The application runs on the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager engine host, so this is where we install
it.
The virt-viewer package is part of the Oracle Linux Yum Server repository containing the
latest Oracle Linux packages, its in the ol7_latest repository.
So we use the yum install virt-viewer command to install it.
Now lets look at the steps for creating a new virtual machine, and examine some of the
virtual machine creation options.
We have already logged into our Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager Administration Portal,
and are currently looking at the dashboard screen.
To start, we select Compute from the left navigation menu and then click Virtual Machines.
The Virtual Machines list opens.
To create a new VM, we click the New button, which opens the New Virtual Machine dialog
window.
By default the General tab is selected on the sidebar.
For this demonstration we will only look at the options needed to create a basic virtual
machine.
As you will see later, there are many configurable options in this dialog.
But for now we are only focusing on a few of them.
From the Cluster drop-down list, the cluster named Default displays in the drop-down menu.
Since the Default cluster is the only one available, we keep this selection for the
new VM.
If we wanted to use a template to create a virtual machine, we would select one from
the drop-down list.
But we are not using templates to create this time, so we keep the default of Blank.
Next, we choose the operating system to run on our new virtual machine.
As we see scrolling down the list, Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager supports a variety
of Linux distributions and multiple versions of Windows.
The drop-down list defaults to Oracle Linux 7.x x64, which is the option we will use,
so we leave it selected.
Under Instance Types, you can define the hardware for the virtual machine.
The term Instance Types is analogous to a shape in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
You can select from five predefined types or shapes ranging from Tiny to Extra Large.
The default selection is Custom.
These Instance Types help you create virtual machines for various types of cloud usage
cases.
Each configuration allocates a predefined amount of memory and number of virtual CPUs,
or vCPUs, to the virtual machine.
The Tiny configuration allocates 512 megabytes of memory and 1 virtual CPU.
The Small configuration allocates 2 gigabytes of memory and 1 virtual CPU.
The Medium configuration 4 gigabytes of memory and 2 virtual CPUs.
The Large configuration 8 gigabytes of memory and 2 virtual CPUs.
And the Extra Large configuration 16 gigabytes of memory and 4 vCPUs.
Notice that the link icon is open or broken, meaning this virtual machine is not associated
with a specific instance type.
When you select a specific instance type, for us the Large type, the link icon closes
and associates the virtual machine to that instance type.
But lets change the type back to Custom for our VM.
This will allow us to set our memory and vCPUs to what we want, but in the dialog will show
a default giving us 1 gigabyte of memory and 1 virtual CPU.
The Optimized For drop-down has three options.
Desktop, Server, and High Performance.
These options optimize the virtual machine for their usage.
Virtual machines optimized to run as Desktop systems are stateless, use thin disk image
allocation, and have a sound card.
Virtual machines acting as servers have no sound card, are not stateless, and utilize
cloned disk images.
High performances virtual machines use optimized configuration settings that achieve near bare-metal
performance.
In the Name field, we enter a name ol7-vm1 for the new machine.
And I will skip down to Instance Images section of the dialog window and add some storage
to this virtual machine.
We can do this by either using an existing virtual disk or creating a new one.
To use an existing disk, you would click Attach and then select the virtual disk to use.
For this demonstration, we will create a new virtual disk, so we click Create.
In the New Virtual Disk dialog window, for the Size field we enter 4 for the size of
the disk in gibibytes, or GiB.
We then click OK.
Now under the Instance Images section we see our 4GiB disk called ol7_vm1_Disk1.
Next, we need to add a network interface to connect the virtual machine to a network.
To do that, we select a vNIC profile representing a logical network from the nic1 drop-down
list.
The vm-net network is our virtual machine network, so we select that one.
Clicking Show Advanced Options displays additional configuration options available for the new
virtual machine.
We will look at the System tab on the sidebar showing you the options we are interested
in.
Here is where you can adjust the number of CPUs and memory size for the virtual machine.
Because our instance type is custom, we can change the values to our requirements.
If we had selected, or changed now, for example, to a Medium type, then these fields would
be populated with those preconfigured settings.
But if we then changed the values it would simply again change the type, setting it back
to Custom and showing the unlinked icon beside them.
For this demonstration, lets simply keep the default values.
These are for a Large type as earlier we selected that type before changing back to a Custom
type.
Next, we click the Boot Options tab on the sidebar and specify the boot sequence for
the virtual machine.
We then select the CD-ROM device from the First Device drop-down list.
We click Attach CD checkbox with the appropriate ISO file chosen from the drop-down list.
For this example, we select OracleLinux-R7-U7-Server-x86_64-dvd.iso.
Remember to change the First Device from CD-ROM to Hard Disk from the drop-down list after
you install the Oracle Linux guest OS.
Click OK to create the virtual machine.
After some time, we see notifications showing that the VM has been created and its disk
has been added.
Now, we are ready to install a guest operating system on the new virtual machine.
The new virtual machine appears in the table with a red icon showing that the VM is down.
To start the virtual machine, click to highlight the VM in the table and then click the Run
button.
Recall that when creating this VM, we selected the CD-ROM as the first boot device.
The Status icon transitions from a red triangle icon to a green triple-triangle indicating
the VM is powering up.
While we are waiting for the VM to boot, I am going to launch the Console so that we
can observe the boot sequence.
With our VM highlighted, we click the Console button.
The Opening console.vv dialog opens.
Console.vv is the connection file for the Virt-Viewer application.
We click OK to view the console window.
I am moving the window to the middle of the screen so we can watch the status icons for
our VM in the list behind change.
Notice that when the green notification pop-up appears indicating that the VM has booted
completely, the icon transitions from a triple to a single icon, and the Oracle Linux Installer
appears.
We could finish installing Oracle Linux on this guest, but for this video this is enough
as it shows we have started and accessed the console connection on our new virtual machine.
In this video, you learned how to identify the physical, logical and virtual components
needed to create virtual machines.
To identify the tool used to access a virtual machine console from the Administration Portal.
You learned the steps for creating a virtual machine using the Oracle Linux Virtualization
Manager Administration Portal.
And how to start the new virtual machine and access its console.
Oracle provides an extensive number of resources which you can use to find out more about this
subject and others.
You can find more videos about using Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager from the training
library link provided.
You can find documentation on Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager at the link shown.
And for an extensive list of libraries of content on a large range of Oracle Linux related
subjects go to the link provided.
There is a comprehensive Oracle Linux curriculum available to support a full range of Linux
administration skills for cloud, on-premise and hybrid users.
And for more information or to get started on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, go to cloud.oracle.com.
And for more training on Linux on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure go to the link shown here.
Thats the end of the video.
Thanks for watching.