This document discusses provisioning virtual machines using Foreman and Libvirt. It provides an overview of provisioning types and the provisioning workflow. It then describes how to install and configure Libvirt and Foreman to provision VMs on Libvirt, including enabling necessary services, defining a network, and configuring host creation requirements.

1. Provisioning with Foreman
Nikhil Kathole
Associate Quality Engineer @ Red Hat

2. Agenda
● What is Provisioning?
● Provisioning Types
● Provisioning Workflow
● Provisioning VMs on Libvirt
● Demo

3. Process that starts with a bare physical or virtual machine and
ends with a fully configured, ready-to-use operating system.

4. Provisioning Types
Slide credit: edureka.
Bare Metal Provisioning
- Discovery
- Bootdisk
Cloud Providers
- Openstack
- Amazon EC2
- Google
Virtualization Infrastructure
- RHEV/Ovirt
- VMware
- Libvirt
Linux Containers
- Atomic
- Docker

5. Provisioning Virtual
machines on Libvirt
Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVMs) use an open source
virtualization daemon and API called libvirt
● yum install -y libvirt libvirt-daemon-kvm virt-install qemu-kvm
● Add tcp connection config
sed -i 's/^#*s*LIBVIRTD_ARGS=.*/LIBVIRTD_ARGS=--listen/' /etc/sysconfig/libvirtd
sed -i 's/^#*s*listen_tcps*=.*/listen_tcp = 1/' /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf
● Enable and restart libvirtd service
● virsh net-define
<network>
<name>foreman</name>
<forward mode='nat'>
<nat>
<port start='1024' end='65535'/>
</nat>
</forward>
<ip address='192.168.100.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
</ip>
</network>")

6. Configuring Foreman
● Enable DHCP, DNS, and TFTP services
● Foreman-installer options
○ --foreman-proxy-dns="true"
--foreman-proxy-dns-interface="virbr0"
--foreman-proxy-dns-zone="example.com"
--foreman-proxy-dns-forwarders="<IP>"
○ --foreman-proxy-dhcp="true"
--foreman-proxy-dhcp-range="192.168.100.10
192.168.100.254"
○ --foreman-proxy-tftp="true"
--foreman-proxy-tftp-servername="student.example.com"

7. Requirements for Host Creation
● Content -----> Activation Key
○ Activation key provides OS, kickstart and tools repo urls
● Provider -----> Compute resource
● Storage, Memory ----> Compute profile
● Network Configurations -----> Subnet
● All configurations inheritance -----> Host group

8. Connect Foreman to Compute Resource
● Infrastructure -> Compute Resources
● Infrastructure -> Compute Profiles
● Infrastructure -> Subnet
● Infrastructure -> Domain
● Configure -> Hostgroup
● Hosts -> Create Host

9. Provisioning Workflow
● Foreman Server -----> unused IP address from the DHCP
● The DHCP Server -----> reserves an entry for the host
● A forward and reverse DNS record -----> smart-proxy Server
associated with the domain
● The new host -----> a DHCP lease from the DHCP server
● DHCP server -----> returns TFTP options (next-server, filename)
● The host -----> the bootloader and menu from the TFTP server
● OS installer -----> the chosen provision template or script from the
Foreman Server
● Foreman Server -----> returns the resulting kickstart to the host
● The host enters a build process and installs the operating system,
registers the host to the Foreman Server, and installs
management tools (katello-agent, puppet)

10. THANK YOU!
Follow me:
Twitter: @NikhilKathole1
Github: ntkathole