Nagios XI vm install guide for Redhat

[gabrotherton]

That most definitely is a bootable disk. It's not like an iso or anything, it is the system drive (e.g. "C drive") of your Nagios installation. Hundreds of people boot that disk image every day.

OK then, I may have been treating the vkdm as an iso. In Redhat usually we start the virtul manager and point to an install location which I was setting as the location of the .vkdm file and I think the virtual manager didn't know what to do with it. This is actually my first shot at setting up a virtual instance of Nagios XI in a virtual environment. My development environment has a system installation of Nagios XI. So I'm in new territory.

Are you most certainly configuring it as your root disk. Something like this:

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    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='vmdk' cache='none'/>
      <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/NFS/nagiosxi-2014r2.7-64-disk1.vmdk'/>
      <backingStore/>
      <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
      <alias name='ide0-0-0'/>
      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='0'/>
    </disk>

I really am not sure about this part.

Is there a detailed document that I can read through about how to set this up? I know this problem has been solved many times over and I'm sorta embarrassed that I'm hitting trivial road blocks. But this is my first attempt at running Nagios virtually.

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I did find this on Red Hat's community support site:

Issue
Is it possible to convert a standalone vmdk file (image of a VMware guest) as a RHEV guest?

Resolution

Red Hat doesn't support conversion of standalone vmdk files. There should be a VMWare host and management interface for the conversion using virt-v2v.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Red Hat does offer some steps that follow, however if there is something easier that I can use to start up the VMDK, please let me know.

Thanks.

[jdalrymple]

So just so that we isolate that as any sort of a problem, let's convert the VMDK. This is the command I use to convert the VMDK... if you don't have this command on one of your RHEV systems it would be trivial to create a quick CentOS box with the necessary virtual bits to make it happen. Just choose installation type virtualization server. Hopefully you don't have to do that though:

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qemu-img convert -p -O qcow2 /path/to/hostname-flat.vmdk /some/output/location/hostname.qcow2

Then you'll have a disk image we KNOW FOR CERTAIN RHEV can handle.

After that you'll create your new VM. The XML I posted earlier is the "by hand" way of creating your VM. Since you're using a GUI I'll post what it looks like when I try to use virt-manager myself to create a VM with an existing disk image - see attachment.

[gabrotherton]

Thanks for the reply! This makes much more sense now and yes, the CentOS virtual manager is very similar to the RHEV.

I'll run down and give this a try

[lmiltchev]

I'll run down and give this a try

Let us know if you have any more questions/issues. Thanks!

[gabrotherton]

No, this did not work.

According to red hat's documentation, the virtual machine manager is supposed to recognize vmdk file formats. But I get an error "No boot disk found" when I try booting from the plain vmdk file. So I did the conversion:

[root@sms1 nagios_tmp]# qemu-img convert -p -O qcow2 nagiosxi-2014r2.7-64-disk1.vmdk /usr/local/share/nagiosxi/nagiosxi.qcow2
(100.00/100%)
[root@sms1 nagios_tmp]#

and that completed to 100% without issues.

Then I created the virtual instance using Red Hat's virtual machine manager:

Step 1 of 4: Virtual machine details
Name: nagios-xi-vm
(selected) Import existing disk image

Step 2 of 4: Provide the existing storage path:
/usr/local/share/nagiosxi/nagiosxi.qcow2
Choose an operating system type and version:
OS type: generic
Version: generic

Step 3 of 4: Choose Memory and CPU settings:
RAM: 16384 MB (64 GB available)
CPUs: 8 (of 32 available)

Step 4 of 4: Ready to begin installation of nagios-xi-vm
OS: generic
Install Import existing OS image
Memory: 16384 MB
CPUs: 8
Storage: 2.3 GB /usr/local/share/nagiosxi/nagiosxi.qcow2

(click finish)

Looks like the creation starts OK, but then the "BIOS" gets to a point where it says:

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Booting from Floppy...
Boot failed:  could not read the boot disk
No bootable device.

I'll be glad to try all this at command line, incase there is something in the Red Hat tool that is not correct.
Any ideas?

[root@sms1 nagiosxi]# qemu-img info nagiosxi.qcow2
image: nagiosxi.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 10G (10737418240 bytes)
disk size: 2.3G
cluster_size: 65536
[root@sms1 nagiosxi]#

I am positive this something very trivial.

[jdalrymple]

From the command line of your RHEV machine can you do virsh dumpxml hostname where hostname is the name of your newly created VM? Copy the output of that and send it our way. I don't believe there will be any sensitive data in that, but you might want to glance over it to verify.

[gabrotherton]

[root@sms1 nagiosxi]# uname -a
Linux sms1.cccs 2.6.32-504.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Sep 16 01:56:35 EDT 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@sms1 nagiosxi]#

The output of the virsh command is in the attached file

[jdalrymple]

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    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='none'/>
      <source file='/usr/local/share/nagiosxi/nagiosxi.qcow2'/>
      <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
      <alias name='ide0-0-0'/>
      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='0'/>
    </disk>

I'm not positive that this is the issue, but maybe... looks like you chose a raw disk type instead of qcow2. Can you go through the process again and make sure that you specify your disk as qcow2?

[gabrotherton]

I'm going to create a new VM instance with the virtualization manager. How do I select the disk type? The GUI tool doesn't seem to provide the option to set the type. But there are a lot of other options with command line virtual manager. Any ideas?

Is this vmdk file a Red Hat, CentOS, SuES, Debain? What should start up when the image installs?

[jdalrymple]

In virt-manager there is an option to customize advanced settings (or some similar business) before you actually commit creating the domain. This takes you basically into the settings for the domain. In there you can choose the storage format for the disk. Honestly you probably need not start from scratch, you can probably just adjust it on your existing domain and it will take off.