Month: April 2017

Run CentOS 7.2/ppc64le as a standard KVM host

/ mengxd / Leave a comment

By default, CentOS 7.x has the KVM virtualization support in kernel. However, there are a few user-space packages missing.

Assuming you have a CentOS 7.2/ppc64le installed on a PowerLinux server already. You first need to configure a new repo to add in the missing user-space packages:

$ sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/virt.repo

[virt]

name=CentOS/RHEL-$releasever - Virt

baseurl=ftp://ftp.unicamp.br/pub/ppc64el/centos/7_2/virt/

gpgcheck=0

enabled=1
[openstack-mitaka-dependency]

name=OpenStack Mitaka Dependency Repository

baseurl=ftp://ftp.unicamp.br/pub/ppc64el/centos/7_2/openstack/mitaka/

gpgcheck=0

enabled=1

$ sudo yum repolist

$ sudo yum install gperf-tools-lib qemu-img-ev-2.3.0 qemu-kvm-common-ev qemu-kvm-ev -y

Then we need to play a trick by softlinking /usr/libexec/qemu-kvm to /usr/bin/qemu-system-ppc64, otherwise virsh will fail on certain commands.

$ sudo ln -s /usr/libexec/qemu-kvm /usr/bin/qemu-system-ppc64

Next, in case you have a VM image and VM configuration XML dump that were created on PowerKVM 3.x, you need to manually modify XML configuration:

<type arch=’ppc64le’ machine=’pseries-rhel7.2.0‘>hvm</type>

After completing the above steps, you should be able to use familiar CLIs such as virsh to manage your KVM virtualization environment the same way as on x86.