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Asked: 2014-10-22 12:02:36 +0800 CST

Deploying Virtual Machines Using Salt and Salt-Virt on Ubuntu Server

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I am using Salt to provision machines, both physical and virtual, for my company. It would be really nice if I could also use Salt (Salt-Virt) to manage the various virtual machines running on my hosts, as the number/complexity of VMs is growing quickly.

Here's where I am:

  • Followed this guide, changing packages for Ubuntu instead of RHL: http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/tutorials/cloud_controller.html
  • Both the physical and virtual machines are running Ubuntu Server
  • I am able to run the salt-run virt.init test1 2 512 salt://BASE.img command to deploy the machine to the host.
  • The image is showing up on the minion in /srv/salt-images/test1/ as a .qcow2

But it seems that the host (hypervisor) has no idea that the VM exists. I am not getting any errors from Salt on the master or the minion.

  • On the host, virsh list brings back an empty list
  • On the Salt master, salt-run virt.start test1 returns the error: Failed to find vm test1 to start

Has anyone ever gotten Salt-Virt to work on Ubuntu? What am I missing?

ubuntu

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I found the solution. Here are the steps:

    • Two machines, M1 and M2
    • On M1:
      • Install salt master
      • Move your virtual hard drive to this machine, place it in /srv/salt
        • For me, this was /srv/salt/base.vdi
      • Convert the virtual machine file to qcow2 format
        • For me, this was qemu-img -f vdi -O qcow2 base.vdi base.qcow2
    • On M2:
      • Install salt minion
      • Install libvirt-bin
      • Install python-libvirt
      • configure a bridged network interface called br0
        • This is important, because that is the default interface name to which salt-virt attaches VMs

    Cool. The machines should be ready to go now.

    On the master, run salt "*" virt.init <name_of_vm> <num_cores_for_vm> <mb_of_ram_for_vm> <path_to_image>

    For me, this was salt "*" virt.init test_vm 2 512 salt://base.qcow2

    Machine should spin up on M2.

    Test using salt-run virt.query on the salt master

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