Setting up a private cloud within your organisation isn’t a particular hard thing to do. Even old hardware (like old laptops) can easily be turned into cloud servers. In this blog post I will guide you through the basic process of setting up a private cloud using Oracle VM Server 3 and Oracle VM Manager 3 software. The first part is about the setup and installation of the Oracle VM Servers and Oracle VM Manager software. The second part is all about using Oracle VM Manager to configure your private cloud. Finally, the third part is about actually running virtual machines in your private cloud.
Requirements
I would set the hardware requirements for the Oracle VM Server nodes as at least a 64-bit CPU which supports either Intel’s virtualization technology “VT-x”, or AMD’s “AMD-V”. A minimum of 4GB RAM is recommended. Perfect specs of all those obsolete 3 – 4 year old laptops.
For the Oracle VM Manager 3 instance a dual core machine with 4GB RAM works perfectly.
You will need a network storage (NFS for example). This can be JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). If you don’t have network storage, you can also configure the Oracle VM Manager machine to expose its unused disk space as a NFS share (perfect for DEV setups). I recommend at least 1TB as storage.
Setting up the nodes
Setting up the Oracle VM Server nodes is a 10 minute job. Download Oracle VM Server from Oracle eDelivery and burn it on a CD (or some other bootable medium of some sort). Give the node a fixed IP-address and an easily recognizable hostname. The installation steps are depicted on this website. I recommend enabling Wake-On-LAN in the machine’s BIOS, because this enable you to use the Distributed Power Management policy in Oracle VM Manager.
When you set up multiple nodes, I suggest keeping the OVM Agent password the same. This makes the server discovery easier in Oracle VM Manager.
Setting up Oracle VM Manager
Oracle VM Manager 3 can be downloaded from Oracle eDelivery. I recommend it to be installed on a Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 installation. The base install will suffice. For a simple DEV/TEST setup, the “Simple Install” of Oracle VM Manager is perfect. The installation steps are described in this guide.
Optional step: if you don’t have a network storage available, the spare disk space of this machine can be exposed as NFS.
Log in as root on the Oracle VM Manager machine. Create a directory for the repository, e.g.:
mkdir /Repository chmod -R 777 /Repository
Edit /etc/exports, e.g.:
/Repository *(rw,sync)
Restart the NFS deamon:
service nfs restart
On the next page I will continue with setting up the private cloud.
A guide to building your private cloud using Oracle VM Server 3,
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