Virtualization on Amit Agarwal Linux Blog

VMWare workstation - ova import not working

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0530

VMWare workstation - ova import not working

When importing ova and/or ovf files, if Workstation does not give any error but does not import the file as well, try importing the file in VMWare Player. When you do that, you will see that if the import fails, player will show a dialogue with log file name similar to /tmp/vmaware-<amitag>/.

From there, I was able to find out that, it was running ovftool.bin. Try to run that in a terminal and immediately I could see that libnsl was missing so, I just installed the same with

virt-install with cloud-init

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0530

If you have not heard about cloud-init then you should definately search for it and learn about cloud-config as well. You can find the documentation for cloud-config here. It is used for configuring VMs when running in cloud environments. Specially useful to inject the ssh keys or set the root password but you can do anything in the cloud-config as there is a section where you can run bash commands. While this is useful for cloud instances, you can make use of this feature when running your vm with qemu or libvirtd. All you need to do is either attach a iso disc with user-data and meta-data files in it or even simpler, you can use virt-install command. The command that I use is as follows

Podman repositories on ubuntu like distros

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 08:38:57 +0530

Recently I installed podman on ubuntu based dervative. I like podman a lot but to my distress I found that after installation, I was not able to search or run any containers. Found out that the repositories were not configured. So, if you run into such issues, then here is what you need to do. You need to create a file /etc/containers/registries.conf. And the contents of the file for just one docker hub registries would be -

Fix display size on libvirt/Qemu guest

Mon, 22 May 2017 01:05:14 +0000

Lot of times I find myself of VM that does not correctly resize the screen display and that is literally nuisance. So, here is quick and dirty fix for this.

First you need to find out information about your display with following command:

xrandr -q

And you will see output like this:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 8192 x 8192
Virtual-0 connected primary 1920×1080+0+0 0mm x 0mm
1024×768      59.92 +
1920×1200     59.88
1920×1080     59.96*
1600×1200     59.87
1680×1050     59.95
1400×1050     59.98
1280×1024     59.89
1440×900      59.89
1280×960      59.94
1280×854      59.89
1280×800      59.81
1280×720      59.86
1152×768      59.78
800×600       59.86
848×480       59.66
720×480       59.71
640×480       59.38
Virtual-1 disconnected
Virtual-2 disconnected
Virtual-3 disconnected

Install virtual machines in one line

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:47:23 +0000

To install a VM from command line, you can use the following command. Change the required parameters as need but you need to change at-least CDROM iso image and disk-path.

virt-install \
    -n myVM \
    --description "Test VM" \
    --os-type=Linux \
        --os-variant=centos7 \
        --ram=2048 \
        --vcpus=2 \
        --disk path=./myVM.img,bus=virtio,size=10 \
        --graphics none \
        --cdrom  <Image installtion CDROM>.iso \
        --net user

Python script to manage virtual machines with python API for libvirt.

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 01:00:51 +0000

Most of times I use virt-manager to manage VMs but sometimes, I have to manage VMs on other hosts over ssh when connected over VPN or while I am working remotely. GUI like virt-manager thus becomes slow, and hence I like to use cli commands and nothing is better than virsh. But here is simple script that I use sometimes to manage the VMs with CLI based menu. Hope you find it useful.

Most simple and fast lightweight container with Fedora systemd

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 01:05:32 +0000

If you need to have a quick bash shell in sandbox with not network as well, then the most simple command I could find so far is:

sudo virt-sandbox -c lxc:/// /bin/bash

For this you will need to have libvirt-sandbox installed which you can do with the following command:

sudo yum install libvirt-sandbox

virsh – show ip address of all running VMs

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:52:31 +0000

If you are using the libvirt and associated tools, then you must be aware about virt-manager. However this being a GUI tools, it is not possible to always use this. “virsh” is a good option for this.

To start with, if you need to know all the VMs all the running VMs, then you can use (to only view the names):

virsh list --name

Extending this to make it more useful is the case if you need to know the IP address for the running VMs. Here is a simple code that you can put in alias or function that can be used to get the IP address of the running VM’s.

dnsmasq local name resolution with NetworkManager

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 01:15:06 +0000

Network Manager suports starting dnsmasq which helps you have a local cache for DNS thus getting faster resolution for the DNS queries.

Dnsmasq with netowrkmanager

So, one thing that I have been thinking about is having a local name resolution for the VMs. So, I wanted something like this to work:

vm1 => 172.17.42,1

vm2 => 172.17.42,2

and so on …

To achieve this and reverse dns to work, we will add the entries in file “/etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d/hostnames“. Just one more problem, adding so many entries manually? So, to help you with that, I created this small script:

docker search description truncated

Tue, 05 May 2015 00:55:32 +0000

When you search with “docker search”, you would notice that the description of the image is truncated. Sometimes you want to see full description, to do so, you can use –no-trunc option. So, for example you want to search for fedora images, you can use the following command:

docker search --no-trunc  fedora

apache in docker to serve local website

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 01:15:44 +0000

I have some backup’s of website on my laptop, which I occasionally want to view. Now, I could have setup apache to serve them directly with VirtualHost or alias but wanted a better solution. So, docker comes to rescue.

First, I installed fedora-dockerfiles and then made some modifications, here they are :

sudo yum install fedora-dockerfiles

After this is done, go to /usr/share/fedora-dockerfiles/apache and make some modification to Dockerfile. After the modifications, the file looks like this

qemu manager for Windows to run your linux distribution

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 06:33:49 +0000

If you are into virtualization, then you must have heard about Qemu. And if you are on windows then this is a must:

http://www.davereyn.co.uk/download.htm

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Try a live Distro without burning on CD or running in VM

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:38:51 +0000

I keep trying a lot of distributions and mostly I try them once and get the configurations and put them on my box :), this works best for me so that I dont have to keep re-configuring my system again and again. So, burning the disc for one time use is overhead and wastes a lot of time for me.

Why burn a disc when GRUB is there to help. So today we will try to use the installed grub run a extracted iso image. Lets go step by step:

Access the disk image created by Qemu using guestfish in Fedora.

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:57:06 +0000

If you are used to using Qemu for doing some experiments with different distro’s then you would also understand the problem of having to do ftp/ssh to copy the files from virtual machine to local machine. Also you have to run the machine to do that. How would you like to have a application that can help you copy the files to and from the image without having to run the VM. That’s exactly what the guestfish does. How to do it, quick demo here:

Virtualization on Amit Agarwal Linux Blog

VMWare workstation - ova import not working

VMWare workstation - ova import not working

virt-install with cloud-init

Podman repositories on ubuntu like distros

Fix display size on libvirt/Qemu guest

Install virtual machines in one line

Python script to manage virtual machines with python API for libvirt.

Most simple and fast lightweight container with Fedora systemd

virsh – show ip address of all running VMs

dnsmasq local name resolution with NetworkManager

docker search description truncated

apache in docker to serve local website

qemu manager for Windows to run your linux distribution

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Try a live Distro without burning on CD or running in VM

Access the disk image created by Qemu using guestfish in Fedora.