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The Vdsm service exposes an API for managing virtualization hosts running the KVM hypervisor technology. Vdsm manages and monitors the host's storage, memory and networks as well as virtual machine creation, other host administration tasks, statistics gathering, and log collection.
The Vdsm service can be used by following the standard autotools installation process, documented in the INSTALL file. As a quick start you can do
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc \
--localstatedir=/var --libdir=/usr/lib
make
sudo make install
In order to start vdsm at first try, please perform:
vdsm-tool configure [--force]
--force flag will override old conf files with vdsm defaults and
restart services that were configured (if were already running)
The 'vdsm.spec' file demonstrates how to distribute Vdsm as an RPM package.
While Vdsm focus is on managing KVM virtual machines, it could also run containers alongside virtual machines, using docker.
Containers are reported as special-purpose VMs to the clients, and respond to the Vdsm API invoked on them. If a particular container runtime doesn't support an operation, this will fail with a standard Vdsm error.
To try this out, you just need to install the 'vdsm-containers subpackage'. Make sure to restart both supervdsmd and vdsmd once that package is installed. You'll also need to have the container runtime you wish to use installed on the same host which runs Vdsm. At the moment, only docker is supported.
To check if the Vdsm is properly configured to run containers, just do:
# vdsm-client Host getCapabilities | grep containers
"containers": true,
This means that this Vdsm could also run docker containers.
Any Engine >= 3.6 could handle containers - they are just VMs from its perspective. You just need to set a few custom properties. Run this command on your Engine host:
# engine-config -s UserDefinedVMProperties='volumeMap=^[a-zA-Z_-]+:[a-zA-Z_-]+$;containerImage=^[a-zA-Z]+(://|)[a-zA-Z]+$;containerType=^docker$' --cver=4.1
replace --cver=4.1 with the version of the Engine you are using. There is no need to configure the regular expressions to match your environment, they should be used verbatim. Now restart Ovirt Engine, and log in.
You can now run any container. The user defined VM properties define the key settings which are not (yet) exposed in the engine UI. You can change those values freely using the "edit VM" window in the Engine webadmin UI.
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volumeMap allows you to mount any disk inside the container, should you need any persistence. It is a mapping between disks (e.g. vda) and mountpoint (e.g. data). The mountpoints are just container-dependent labels.
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containerImage is the URL of any container image supported by your runtime. E.g. 'redis'. You must use the same format docker uses
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containerType allows to select the runtime you want to use. Currently only the docker runtime is supported. This variable actually enables all the container support infrastructure, on a per-VM basis. Without this property set, the default is to ignore any container setting.
Please be aware that many settings are ignored by containers, like all the device configurations. Only memory and CPU settings are honoured.
There are two mailing lists for discussions:
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For technical discussions about the project and its code base.
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For questions by users, who do not want to be swamped by technicalities.
The developers also hang out on IRC at #vdsm hosted on freenode.net
The latest upstream code can be obtained from GIT:
git clone https://gerrit.ovirt.org/vdsm
Vdsm is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. Please see the COPYING file for complete GPLv2+ license terms.
In addition, as a special exception, Red Hat, Inc. and its affiliates give you permission to distribute this program, or a work based on it, linked or combined with the OpenSSL project's OpenSSL library (or a modified version of that library) to the extent that the library, or modified version, is covered by the terms of the OpenSSL or SSLeay licenses. Corresponding source code for the object code form of such a combination shall include source code for the parts of OpenSSL contained in the combination.
If you modify this program, you may extend this exception to your version, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.