A guide to building your private cloud using Oracle VM Server 3

On the previous two pages I have shown you how to install your Oracle VM Servers and Oracle VM Manager and shown you how to configure your private cloud using Oracle VM Manager. In this final part of the guide, I’ll show you how to leverage Oracle’s VM Templates in your cloud.

So now you have your private cloud in place. Time to run some virtual machines. To get ISO files, VM templates etc. in your Repository and therefore in your cloud, you’ll need to import it. Oracle VM Manager allows you to specify a FTP, HTTP or HTTPS location from which a node from the Server Pool will import.

VM Templates import screen in Oracle VM Manager

From Oracle’s eDelivery portal you can download ready made virtual machine guests. Unzip these templates on your FTP server for example, and import them into your Repository.

Import VM Template

After you have imported the template, it can be edited to suit your needs. You can change the available memory, network, extra disks etc.

Edit the VM Template

When the template is ready, you can clone a virtual machine from the template. It is important that you assign your network to the template, otherwise the virtual machine won’t have networking in the end.

Clone a virtual machine from a template

Now the virtual machine is ready! It will be assigned to a server in the Server Pool so you can start it. Note that these Templates from Oracle have these setup steps at first boot. It will ask you for network settings (IP-address, hostname etc). You must therefore connect to its console at first boot. To do this, right click on the virtual machine and click Launch Console. This will open a Java VNC client to connect to the virtual machine’s console.

VM's Console

Of course you don’t have to use Oracle’s VM Templates. You can also create them from scratch. However, that’s a bit more work. If you use Linux in your cloud, then the Oracle Enterprise Linux templates from Oracle are a perfect starting point. Just add some extra disk(s) to your Template and you have a good base image for your virtual machines.

This concludes my basic guide for building your own private cloud. Have fun setting up your own!