Re: [gentoo-user] installing virtual machine under gentoo

[Grant Taylor]

On 1/2/22 12:14 AM, John Covici wrote:
> OK, I fixed it, the group name was wrong when I tried the last time, I
> had libvirtd and its only libvirt and that seems to have fixed things.

Thank you for the clarifying follow up.  Here's hoping you same someone 
else time in the future.  :-)

On 1/2/22 9:58 AM, John Covici wrote:
> OK, more progress and a few more questions.

Yay progress!

> In the virt-manager, I could not figure out how to add disk storage
> to the vm.  I have a partition I can use for the disk storage --
> is this different from the  virtual machine image?

It depends.™

KVM / libvirt / Qemu can use raw partitions, files on a mounted file 
system, logical volumes, ZFS vDevs, iSCSI, and other things for storage. 
  Each one is configured slightly differently.  So, which method do you 
want to use?

I'd suggest that you /start/ with files on a mounted file system and 
then adjust as you need / want to.  At least as long as you're getting 
your feet wet.

 From memory, you need to define a directory as a storage location to 
KVM / libvirt.  --  I'm not currently using KVM so I'm working from a 
mixture of memory and what I can poke without spinning things up.

1)  Open VMM (virt-manager).
2)  Select the KVM host in the window.
3)  Edit -> Connection Details
4)  Go to the Storage tab.
5)  Click the plus below the left hand pane.
6)  Choose and enter a name for the storage pool.
7)  Choose "dir: Filesystem Directory" as the type.
8)  Choose a target path by typing or browsing to it.
9)  Click Finish.

Now the storage pool you created should appear as an option when 
creating a VM.

> Of even more importance, how do I bridge the vm onto my existing
> network?

This is also done through host properties on the Virtual Networks tab.

I don't remember the specifics (and can't walk through it the same way 
for reasons).  I usually did most of the management via the 
/etc/conf.d/net file as I do a lot of things with networking that few 
things can properly administer (802.3ad LACP, 802.1q VLAN, bridging, l2 
filtering, l3 filtering, etc).

What I remember doing was re-configuring the (primary) network interface 
so that it came up without an IP address and was added as a member to a 
newly created bridge.  As part of that I moved the system's IP 
address(es) from the underlying Ethernet interface to the newly created 
Bridge interface.

With the bridge created and manged outside of VMM (virt-manager) I was 
able to add new VMs / containers to the existing Bridge interface.  Thus 
establishing a layer 2 connection from the VM(s) / LXC(s) to the main 
network.

Note:  This is somewhat of a simplification as there are VLANs and 
multiple physical interfaces with many logical interfaces on the machine 
that I'm replying to you from.  However, I believe, the concepts hold as 
I've written them.

> I have a nic for internal items named eno1 and another nic which
> connects to the outside world, I would like to bridge to the internal
> network, that would give the vm a dhcp address, etc.

If you have a separate physical NIC, as I had suggested starting with, 
then you can avoid much of the bridge & IP re-configuration in the 
/etc/conf.d/net file and /mostly/ manage an independent bridge on the 
additional NIC from within VMM (virt-manager).

The 2nd NIC means that you don't end up with a chicken & egg problem 
trying to administer a network interface across the network, which is 
how I do much of my work.  Re-configuring things through the console 
also simplifies things in this regard.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die