Setup PowerKVM Hypervisor¶

Provision Hypervisor with PowerKVM¶

Please follow the Diskful Installation Documentation Diskful Installation to provision kvm hypervisor with PowerKVM, several customization steps should be taken into consideration.

To demonstrate the brief steps on hypervisor provision, take ibm-powerkvm-3.1.0.0-39.0-ppc64le-gold-201511041419.iso for example here:

Obtain a PowerKVM iso and create PowerKVM osimages with it:

copycds ibm-powerkvm-3.1.0.0-39.0-ppc64le-gold-201511041419.iso

The following PowerKVM osimage will be created on success

# lsdef -t osimage -o pkvm3.1-ppc64le-install-compute
Object name: pkvm3.1-ppc64le-install-compute
    imagetype=linux
    osarch=ppc64le
    osdistroname=pkvm3.1-ppc64le
    osname=Linux
    osvers=pkvm3.1
    otherpkgdir=/install/post/otherpkgs/pkvm3.1/ppc64le
    pkgdir=/install/pkvm3.1/ppc64le
    profile=compute
    provmethod=install
    template=/opt/xcat/share/xcat/install/pkvm/compute.pkvm3.ppc64le.tmpl

Customize the hypervisor node definition to create network bridge

xCAT ships a postscript xHRM to create a network bridge on kvm host during installation/netbooting. Please specify the xHRM with appropriate parameters in postscripts attibute. Here is some examples on this:

To create a bridge with default name ‘default’ against the installation network device which was specified by installnic attribute
```
chdef kvmhost1 -p postscripts="xHRM bridgeprereq"
```
To create a bridge named ‘br0’ against the installation network device which was specified by installnic attribute(recommended)
```
chdef kvmhost1 -p postscripts="xHRM bridgeprereq br0"
```
To create a bridge named ‘br0’ against the network device ‘eth0’
```
chdef kvmhost1 -p postscripts="xHRM bridgeprereq eth0:br0"
```
Note: The network bridge name you use should not be the virtual bridges created by libvirt installation [1].
Customize the hypervisor node definition to mount the shared kvm storage directory on management node (optional)

If the shared kvm storage directory on the management node has been exported, it can be mounted on PowerKVM hypervisor for virtual machines hosting.

An easy way to do this is to create another postscript named “mountvms” which creates a directory /install/vms on hypervisor and then mounts /install/vms from the management node, the content of “mountvms” can be:
```
logger -t xcat "Install: setting vms mount in fstab"
mkdir -p /install/vms
echo "$MASTER:/install/vms /install/vms nfs \
      rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr,nfsvers=2 1 2" >> /etc/fstab
```
Then set the file permission and specify the script in postscripts attribute of hypervisor node definition:
```
chmod 755 /install/postscripts/mountvms
chdef kvmhost1 -p postscripts=mountvms
```

Provision the hypervisor node with the PowerKVM osimage

nodeset kvmhost1 osimage=pkvm3.1-ppc64le-install-compute
rpower kvmhost1 boot

Create network bridge on hypervisor¶

To launch VMs, a network bridge must be created on the PowerKVM hypervisors.

If the hypervisor is provisioned successfully according to the steps described above, a network bridge will be created and attached to a physical interface. This can be checked by running brctl show on the hypervisor to show the network bridge information, please make sure a network bridge has been created and configured according to the parameters passed to postscript “xHRM”

# brctl show
bridge name     bridge id               STP enabled     interfaces
br0             8000.000000000000       no              eth0

If the network bridge is not created or configured successfully, please run “xHRM” with updatenode on managememt node to create it manually::

updatenode kvmhost1  -P "xHRM bridgeprereq eth0:br0"

[1]	Every standard libvirt installation provides NAT based connectivity to virtual machines out of the box using the “virtual bridge” interfaces (virbr0, virbr1, etc) Those will be created by default.