A Red Hat Virtualization Environment (RHEV) consists of a set of Red Hat Virtualization Hypervisors (either RHEL-H or RHEV-H) managed by a centralized management server RHEV-Manager (RHEV-M). The RHEV-M allows creation and management of virtual machines that run on one of the red hat hypervisor instances and allow these virtual machines to live migrate from one to another. In this environment, Veritas InfoScale Storage can be used to extend the virtualization infrastructure with benefits of advanced storage virtualization.
Technology:
In line with the deployment model, the InfoScale Storage solution for Red Hat virtualization is provided in the form of two separate bundles. One bundle consists of the standard Veritas Infoscale Storage Solution that contains Veritas File system (VxFS), Veritas Volume Manager(VxVM) and Veritas Dynamic Multi-pathing (DMP) and other bundle (VRTSrhevm) that contains the plugin for RHEV-M engine.
Some of the key features provided by the solution:
- Adding/Removing Veritas Storage to/from virtual machine
- Including boot support
- Live migration of virtual machines backed by clustered Veritas Storage
- Disaster recovery of virtual machines across data centers configured with Veritas Storage replication
Installation and Configuration:
First, deploy and configure Veritas Infoscale Solution on a standard RHEL host with RHEL-H hypervisor. Then install the VRTSrhevm package on the RHEV-M host. The diagram below provides the brief overview of the configuration:
In order to use Veritas Storage as backing store for virtual machines, either use the 'Veritas Storage' operations in the RHEV-M UI application or login to the RHEV-M console and use vxrhevm CLI. These operations modify the virtual machine configuration files to make individual files on Veritas file systems, volumes or DMP devices available for use as a backing storage for virtual machines in RHEV environment
Below are the steps through which we could easily add the Veritas Infoscale Storage to the VMs:
- Log in - RHEV-M machine through web interface
- Power off the virtual machine and right click to select the operation to attach Veritas Storage
- Select appropriate storage - DMP device/VxVM volumes/VxFS file already configured on the Red Hat hypervisor host. If the storage device needs to be boot device, the check the appropriate check box.
- Click on the "OK". After the operation is successful, a notification about the same would be shown
- Power on the virtual machine
- The attached storage can be viewed under the "Attached Storage" tab of the virtual machine
- In Guest (Virtual Machine), the device attached can be seen as shown below:
- To detach the storage, again power off the virtual machine on which the storage needs to be detached.
- Right click on VM, and select "Detach Veritas Storage"
- Select appropriate storage - DMP device/VxVM volumes/VxFS file to be detached
- Click on the "OK". After success, a notification about the same would be shown
- Power on the virtual machine.
- In Guest (Virtual Machine), the device which was detached would have been removed
CLI command is also available from the RHEV-M host incase the Web UI Plugin cannot be used.
- The attach/detach command would attach/detach the given DMP device, volume device or VxFS file system file as the storage backend for the given virtual machine. The DMP device, volume or file system should be a shared entity across RHEVM cluster in a high availability configuration and a replicated entity in case of disaster recovery configuration. Please note that the virtual machine should be powered off for these operations.
Example of Attach command:
[root@cdc-r720s9 ~]# /opt/VRTSrhevm/bin/vxrhevadm -p 111111 -n vm1 -d /dev/vx/dmp/ds3500-0_28 -b attach
The device /dev/vx/dmp/ds3500-0_28 is successfully attached to the virtual machine vm1.Example of Detach command:
[root@steplx03 ~]# /opt/VRTSrhevm/bin/vxrhevadm -p admin123 -n vm2 -d /dev/vx/dmp/emc_clariion0_1433 detach
The device /dev/vx/dmp/emc_clariion0_1433 is successfully detached from the virtual machine vm2.
[root@steplx03 ~]#
- The list command would list the hypervisors, virtual machines and storage entities attached to virtual machines. Specifying the virtual machine name would restrict the list for provided machine only.
Example of List command:
[root@cdc-r720s9 ~]# /opt/VRTSrhevm/bin/vxrhevadm -p 111111 list
Host Address HostID
================================================================================================
cdc-r720s2 10.200.57.243 afef16c6-ad9f-48c2-88b2-533cce667707
cdc-r720s3 10.200.57.244 ff71ff37-502c-4b9d-8427-472541dc2c51
VM State Host VMID
================================================================================================
vm1 down - cf3bbcc7-b9a1-47e3-a0d5-d5c6679da172
Device Type HookType Attached-VM SerialNo Bootable
==========================================================================================================
/dev/vx/dmp/ds3500-0_28 raw dmpnode vm1 Yes
[root@cdc-r720s9 ~]#
- Other operations such as start/stop of virtual machine, configure after reboot, etc are also supported through CLI. To execute these operations you may refer the man page.
# man vxrhevadm
vxrhevadm {options} {operation}
Where options are:
[ -p <rhevm-password> ]
[ -u <rhevm-user> ]
[ -l <rhevm-url> ]
[ -c <https-cert-file> ]
[ -n <vmname> ]
[ -h <hostname> ]
[ -v <volume-path> ]
[ -d <dmpnode-path> ]
[ -f <file-path:raw> | <file-path:qcow2> ]
Where operations are:
attach | detach
list [ hosts | vms | devices ]
start | stop
configure
#
As can be seen, InfoScale Storage solution seamlessly integrates with Red Hat virtualization environment and provides the storage resiliency and high availability infrastructure for RHEV virtual machines. Do let us know your feedback so that we can improvise on the solution
