Well we hackers can’t live without our machines and that’s so true. Recently I have been playing with EBS volumes in Eucalyptus but was not able to make it work on Centos 5.4 with XEN more information can be found here. Then I thought to give it a try on our KVM + Fedora 12. But wait a minute we need more than 1 machine to try EBS volume. Hmm, just gave it a thought and remembered that I have another laptop with me at home. My brother’s new DELL laptop which is only having Windows 7 and nothing else. He doesn’t like anyone else to install any other OS on it so I thought of putting Fedora 12 inside VMware and finally after doing that I started my hacking experiment.
I have been running my Eucalyptus private cloud on a single laptop till now and knew that I can’t use brother’s laptop as node because it has windows 7 and fedora 12 was running inside VM. So I started installing eucalyptus 1.6.2 on that VM via source and finished eucalyptus as well euca2ools installation. Created that VM as the head running Cloud controller, cluster controller, storage controller and walrus. Next I switched to my laptop from scratch installed eucalyptus and configured it to run as node. My laptop is super cool. It’s been 4 years I have had this machine but the good thing it has the special processor flags which gives VT support so that I can run fully virtualized VM in KVM (kvm_intel).
The next thing which started bothering me was I didn’t had much space on my laptop left to store the instance copies when it boots up and later runs. But I have a 500 GB hard drive which I can use for this purpose. Created a directory on one of the partitions in my external hard drive and inside my node’s eucalyptus.conf
INSTANCE_PATH="/media/f5a889e3-9300-4565-9cb3-9d14b79ad124/images/"
The other thing I changed in my eucalyptus.conf was the VNET_BRIDGE interface which by default is xenbr0. This works good for XEN but not for KVM. Changed it to following:
VNET_BRIDGE="virbr0"
Then I remember that console thing didn’t worked for me when I first tried eucalyptus on KVM+Fedora 12 sometime back and for that to work I was suggested a patch at the forums. Applied that patch on my /opt/eucalyptus/usr/share/eucalyptus/partition2disk and all was set.
The next big thing to work out was my networking. The two laptops could have been connected to each other via a ad-hoc network but I prefer a cable connection as it makes the image transfer faster. I have a cross cable with me so I used it to connect both the laptops. The cross cable connection was available inside my VMware VM via bridged connection. The only thing I did different was the gateway IP inside my head (brother’s laptop fedora 12 VM running inside VMware) I gave my laptop’s eth0 IP. This was done because my instance will get a IP on the subnet 192.168.122.0/255.255.255.0 and my network was on 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0. Once I did that I started the instance and later when it booted was able to ssh to it with my private key (password less login).
The other problem I had was sharing internet connection at the same time. I use a reliance usb device for internet connectivity. I attached that to my laptop started the connection created a simple squid proxy configuration which allows 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 and configured the same proxy on the fedora 12 VM in my brother’s laptop. This made internet as well as yum (had to made a proxy entry in /etc/yum.conf) working on the VM which was required to install some RPMS from the repos.
Sounds cool, eh? Let’s see a picture of this setup.
In the picture above you can see my laptop on the left hand side connected to my external 500 GB maxtor hard drive, reliance USB device and my brother laptop on the right via cross cable wire.
Though the setup worked and I was able to boot instance and login to them I was not able to see my EBS volume inside the VM. I have updated my forum entry for the same and you can find more information about it here. Let me know if you have any suggestions for me.
Please note that this is a small private cloud facility running out of my home and its scalable so if you got a laptop or a machine which you would like to add to this cloud do let me know.
Signing off for now but the love for machines still not ends up going to office to play more with those.