Advantages of Hypervisor Based Cloud Computing

We're creating content for our website... Every. Techie's. Worst. Nightmare. The question came up: "What sets Abacus Data Exchange apart from Rackspace and Amazon's EC2?". Ugh.

We offer a fully customizable virtual machine option. Try getting a 1 CPU, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB persistent storage option with those other two. Most cloud services limit you to specific RAM/Storage sizes. Each of our images come with pre-installed operating systems ready to go on statically sized disk images which don't have much room left on them. At any point, even during creation, you can add additional persistent disk images to your virtual machine (you could try that too, but you won't be able to). Unlike the other two where you can change CPU/RAM/Storage "on-the-fly", we require a reboot of the virtual machine for the changes to take effect.

We also offer hardware based VLAN capabilities. While they cannot be provisioned on demand, a simple request to tech support will get one created free of charge. Combined with a virtual appliance installed with Vyatta, a customer can completely secure a set of virtual machines from the outside world. That's how we run our services. Even our router for our internet service is a virtual appliance.

I believe our biggest advantage is to the local market in Lafayette, LA. Lafayette is home to a successful Fiber-to-the-Home network that is municipally owned. Any home/business on the fiber network can get 100 mbps connectivity to any other peer. Soak that in. If you live in Lafayette, you could create a virtual machine and get 100 mbps connection to that virtual machine. How is that not amazing?!?

Of course, we didn't do this on our own. We have to give props to the awesome team over at Enomaly. Other than that, most of our infrastructure is open sourced. So here's a shoutout to: CentOS, Xen, Fedora, Ubuntu and FAN. Don't forget the ones I already mentioned!

KVM 85-1 in CentOS 5.3 on Liquid IQ

This howto is specifically for a Liquid IQ solution with my configuration. If you have no idea what that means then check out Liquid Computing. I address specific pieces of hardware during the setup that will not be available to most other computing solutions.


This howto covers a base install only of CentOS with no gui to administer. All administration is done remotely using virt-manager through SSH for security reasons. DO NOT USE X11 FORWARDING!!! I was running X11 forwarding over SSH to pull up virt-manager on each machine and found serious vulnerabilities available to hackers on compromised systems (basically they can configure X11 forwarding to open tunnels and take their hacking scripts along for a ride with the X11 forwarding session).

CentOS 5.3 media has a buggy kernel on the installer that will result in a kernel panic after initial install. Download and either burn to DVD or mount through the Liquid KVM solution a CentOS 5.2 installation media.

Boot to CentOS 5.2 media
Hit Enter at the linux # prompt
Tab to the "Skip" button and press Enter at the Media Check box
Click "Next"
Select your language and click "Next" (English used in this howto)
Select your keyboard and click "Next"
Click "Advanced storage configuration"
Click "Add Drive"
Select "eth4 - Intel Corporation 82571EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller"
Uncheck "Use dynamic IP configuration (DHCP)"
In "IPv4 Address:" /
Fill in target information
Click "OK"
Check "Review and modify partitioning layout"
Click "Next"
Click "Yes" on the Warning box that pops up
Select "VolGroup00" in the device list and click "Edit"
In "Volume Group Name" rename to vg_ls# (where # is logical server number)
Select LogVol1 in "Logical Volumes" and click "Edit"
In "Logical Volume Name" rename to lv_swap
Select LogVol0 in "Logical Volumes" and click "Edit"
In "Logical Volume Name" rename to lv_root

These renaming conventions are useful for recovering guest instances within the host. If volume groups and logical volumes are named the same as the instance you are trying to recover them from there is confusion in LVM.

Final outcome should look like the below image (I'm installing ls4 in this instance)

Click "Next"
Click "Yes" to the Partitioning Warnings box that pops up.
Click "Next"
In the Network Devices list uncheck eth0
Check eth2 and click "Edit"
Configure IPv4 settings for your Management network
Uncheck "Enable IPv6 support"
Click "OK"
Check eth4 and click "Edit"
Configure IPv4 settings for your Boot network
Uncheck "Enable IPv6 support"
Click "OK"
Manually assign the hostname if desired
Fill in Gateway and DNS Name Servers
Click "Next"
Select Time Zone and click "Next"
Fill in the Root Password and Confirm
Click "Next"
Uncheck all packages and repositories
Select "Customize now"
Click "Next"
Scroll through all items in the left list box and clear all check marks from the list on the right for each item.

At the time of this writing the items are:
Applications

• Editors
• Text-based Internet

Base System

• Base
• Dialup Networking Support

Click "Next"

Pull up slacker.com in your browser and find a good station to listen to.

When the "Reboot" screen appears remove all media and click "Reboot"

Log in as root

system-config-securitylevel-tui

Select Disabled under SELinux
Click "OK"

exit

From a client computer on the Management network (In this howto it's Fedora 11 workstation setup):

ssh root@<management ip address>
mkdir .ssh
exit
scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@:~/.ssh/ws
ssh root@<management ip address>
cat ~/.ssh/ws &gt; .ssh/authorized_keys
rm -f ~/.ssh/ws
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
:s/PasswordAuthentication\ yes/PasswordAuthentication\ no/g
:wq
service sshd restart
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
:s/enabled=0/enabled=1/g
:wq
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/lfarkas.repo
i
[lfarkas]
name=LFarkas Repository
baseurl=http://www.lfarkas.org/linux/packages/centos/$releasever/$basearch/
#gpgkey=http://www.lfarkas.org/linux/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY
enabled=1
priority=3
gpgcheck=0
<Esc>
:wq
yum -y update yum
yum -y update
reboot

Adjust your slacker radio station if the music isn't good

ssh root@<management ip address>
yum -y install vconfig kmod-kvm kvm libvirt.x86_64 python-virtinst
reboot

This reboot is done to initiate the kvm kernel modification

ssh root@<management ip address>
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth2

Remove all IPADDR/NETMASK/NETWORK/BROADCAST lines.
add the line at the bottom: "BRIDGE=br2"
change BOOTPROTO=none

:wq
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-br2
i
TYPE=Bridge
DEVICE=br2
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=static
BROADCAST=<first 3 octets of management ip range>.255
IPADDR=<management ip address>
NETMASK=<management subnet mask>
NETWORK=<first 3 octets of management ip range>.0
:wq
service network restart
cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf <<EOF
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0
EOF

Now we have a physically bridged network connection that we can use to get our first VM on the management vlan. The last step turns off filtering for our guests to allow all traffic over bridged devices.
 
Now we just need a VM

qemu-img -f qcow2 /path/to/images/myfirstvm.img 10G

virt-install -n myfirstvm -r 1024 --vcpus=1 --os-type=linux --os-variant=rhel5 -c /path/to/isos/CentOS-5.3.iso --disk path=/path/to/images/myfirstvm.img --network=bridge:br2 --vnc --noacpi
exit

This will get you back to your local machine.

yum install libvirt virt-manager

Run virt-manager and create a new connection to the newly built KVM node using SSH.

This is the most secure way I have found to manage my KVM hosts.