OLVM : KVM Certificate Renewal

 

Intro

Virtualization has revolutionized the IT industry by enabling organizations to utilize server resources more efficiently. Despite the rise of cloud technology, many companies are hesitant to migrate their workloads to the cloud due to concerns about data sensitivity and business challenges. For these organizations, virtualization remains the most cost-effective solution, offering both capital expenditure (CapEx) savings and a secure environment.

To host critical database workloads securely, it's crucial to ensure that virtualization platforms are fully protected. Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM) is a key tool for managing these virtual environments, and maintaining its security certificates is essential for safeguarding the infrastructure. Regular renewal of these certificates is necessary to uphold the security and integrity of the virtualized environment.

In this blog, I will illustrate how we renew all KVM certificates. 

This is the main meta link note that can be used for the new engine and KVM certificate.  

OLVM: How to Renew SSL Certificates that are Expired or Nearing Expiration (Doc ID 3006292.1)

OLVM : 2 node with Gluster storage with Arbitrated Replicated Volumes

 

Intro 

Virtualization made a significant change in the IT (Information Technology) industry. This technology helped many organizations to use server resources efficiently. Even though cloud technology is emerging some companies are not ready to move their workloads to the cloud due to data sensitivity and business obstacles. So the only option to save the IT infrastructure cost using virtualization technology. 

For small and medium-scale companies IT budgets are really tight.  Due to a limited budget, It's a challenging job to achieve storage systems stability with virtualization.  When organizations plan on virtualization optimal architecture needs 3 nodes; 3-node architecture gives proper fencing and high availability.  Oracle Corporation combined with open source virtualization and introduced (OLVM) Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager. For OLVM there is no restriction to having 2 node architectures.  When considering the storage availability there are three ways to archive this using OLVM.

• Fiber channel storage - FC data domains.
• Glusterfs Storage - Gluster data domains.
• ISCSI Storage    - ISCSI data domains.

Glusterfs and ISCSI it's a must to have a 10g back-end network for management.  Glusterfs Storage replication is happening via the management network.

Two-node architecture storage stability can be archived by implementing the glusterfs arbitrated replicated volumes. This mainly addresses avoiding storage split-brain conditions.

In this article, I would like to highlight the implementation steps of the gluster storage arbitrator.  

Glusterfs arbitrator implementation prerequisites. 

OLVM : Create FC shared data domain

 

Intro 

Nowadays all the business markets are highly competitive and organizations want to take competitive advantages over others. When business is highly critical databases and application servers need to be up and running 24X7  . Virtualization is the technology that helps to maximize the IT infrastructure cost. High availability of VM can be achieved easily from virtualization clustering. Also, Virtualization technology will ease the cloud migration journey. 

OLVM - Disk state stuck in finalizing state

 

Intro

It's essential to have a proper backup mechanism for virtualization infrastructure. Also, we need to test the backup and recovery method at least once in 3 months to validate that everything is working as expected. Also documenting the recovery procedure helps to avoid surprises when there is a recovery scenario.  Organizations should be ready to address unexpected failures at any time. 

For Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM) 4+ environments you can use API v4 for invoking all backup-related tasks. Import/export mode defines the way the backups and restores are done. OLVM (with API v4) supports 3 modes: