Accessing your RHEV VMs with your iPad and Spice!

A friend of mine sent me a link to a new project that aim to provide a HTML5 client for the Spice protocol (http://www.spice-space.org/page/Html5). He asked me to check if I can access my VMs under RHEV with my iPad.

The page above describe the steps required to connect to a standalone Spice server. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any information about how to connect to a VM running in RHEV. The problem is that you cannot find the address, port and password to connect to the Spice console in the RHEV-M interface. After a bit of research, I found that all the information is there, you just have to search a little bit to get it. Here is the step from the beginning :

Playing with RHEV 3.1

I took the snowy weekend to play with the new release of RHEV 3.1. This new release come with an impressive set of new features, including the removal of the requisite of Internet Explorer! Also included (and to be reviewed in a future post) is the possibility to use a Gluster based storage with RHEV!

My plan for the beginning was to use my old laptop and install RHEV-M on it. That part went well, the installation is now so easy. I also wanted to test the new “All-In-One” plugin on it. This plugin allow one to install a complete and working RHEV environment on a single server. The AIO plugin configure a local data center, cluster, storage and a local host.

This plugin is not supported by Red Hat to use in production case but it’s a welcome addition to ease demoing the RHEV platform. Sadly, I didn’t have much success with it. I had multiple crash and timeout during the plugin configuration that left my RHEV-M not working anymore. (Keep in mind that this plugin is still a proof of concept, oVirt is still working hard to make it work fine.)

So, the plan changed : I used a VM on my new laptop to install RHEV-M and I used my old laptop to install the RHEV hypervisor. One hour later, everything was working fine, I have a few VM running in my “data center”, etc. I also installed the Reports engine to RHEV-M (a big 10 minutes task!). The integration of reports into RHEV-M is absolutely awesome! I can right click on anything and launch a report that give me precious informations about my resources, workload, usage, etc.

The next step is to add a Gluster based storage to my data center and test the new storage live migration with it. I will post my experience with it as soon as I can!

oVirt and GlusterFS

I was checking the wiki of oVirt yesterday when I saw something that I was not aware of : oVirt already support GlusterFS! Not everything is there and working 100% but it’s developing rapidly.

What amaze me is the fast evolution that free software enable. The first official release of oVirt is not 6 months old that I would not have enough space here to list all the new features that are being worked on. Go back 2 years in time when RHEV first came out : it was very promising but at the same time very far from the features set that VMware had. Look at RHEV/oVirt now and the fast pace of development since then.

If you want to try out oVirt and GlusterFS or see what it look like, someone posted a short tutorial on this at http://www.middleswarth.net/content/installing-ovirt-31-and-glusterfs-using-either-nfs-or-posix-native-file-system