Today I had finally some time to play with oracle VM.
Since an installation attempt of a collegue already showed that you could not run oracle vm in a vmware (yes, you can take virtualisation a step to far), I had already reserved some hardware in our test environment (read: I had stolen some old pc’s), but until now I did not had the time to actually install it.
Because two pair of eyes see more then one pair, and because installing a completly new piece of software is always fun, a collegue of mine (Geert De Paep) joined me on this install fest.
Although some steps took a long time to complete, probably due to the state of the art hardware that we where using, the installation of the vm server went rather smoothly. Because we did not bother to read the installation guide we got our first surprise: Oracle VM is using ocfs2 as file system for the images!
Later on, Geert came with an explanation for this: much like with vmware esx, you can build a server farm in which the nodes use a shared storage to access the virtual images, hence the need of a clustered file system.
Installing the management part on a second pc gave us some more problems, but after cleaning up the system (there was still an 11g oracle installed on this system) we could complete the installation without further problems (it is nice to see that oracle vm is actually using XE to store its data).
After this, the system was ready to use and after some trial and error ( and eventually start reading the documentation) we found the default username / password and managed to login to the management console.
Next step was to upload some iso images containing oracle enterprise linux. Because we did not have a ftp server available, we directly copied the iso files to the /OVS/iso_pool/install_images directory on the oracle vm server. According to the documention (which we now had in front of us), we needed to use “internal ISO” as source during the import steps. Unfortunately we could not select an iso group or label during the next step and thus not complete the import. At this moment we where pretty much stuck and we found no solution in the remaining time we had.
Great was my surprise when I tried the import again from home, and without changing anything I could now see the iso group in the drop down box (install_images) and the iso labels (the filename of the iso files). After some further testing it seems that you have to logout and login again before you can see changes (removing, adding) on the iso files, when these changes are done outside of the ovm managment console.
Well, time to go to bed now. Creating an ovm guest will have to wait until tomorrow.
