README.md

libvirt-specific configuration

First-time configuration

• copy main.tf.libvirt.example to main.tf
• if your VMs are to be deployed on an external libvirt host:
  • change the libvirt connection URI in the provider section. Typically it has the form qemu+ssh://<USER>@<HOST>/system assuming that <USER> has passwordless SSH access to <HOST>
  • set up bridged networking:
    • ensure your target libvirt host has a bridge device on the network you want to expose your machines on (Ubuntu instructions)
    • uncomment the bridge variable declaration in the base module and add proper device name (eg. br1)
    • change the network_name variable declaration to empty string ("")
    • optionally specify fixed MAC addresses by adding mac = "CA:FE:BA:BE:00:01" lines to VM modules
  • if other sumaform users deploy to the same host, or different bridged hosts in the same network, uncomment the name_prefix variable declaration in the base module to specify a unique prefix for your VMs
• complete the cc_password variable in the base module
• make sure that:
  • either your target libvirt host has a storage pool named default
  • or you create one
  • or you specify a different name by uncommenting the pool variable declaration in the base module
• if you are not using bridged networking, make sure that:
  • either your target libvirt host has a NAT network which is named default
  • or you create one
  • or you specify a different name by uncommenting the network_name variable declaration in the base module
• decide the set of virtual machines you want to run. Delete any module section relative to VMs you don't want to use and feel free to copy and paste to add more
• run terraform get to make sure Terraform has detected all modules
• run terraform plan to see what Terraform is about to do
• run terraform apply to actually have the VMs set up!

Accessing VMs

All machines come with avahi's mDNS configured by default on the .tf.local domain, and a root user with password linux. Upon provisioning your SSH public key (by default ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) is copied into the remote machine. This means that you can access every machine without supplying any password.

If you want to use another key for all VMs, specify the path of the public key with ssh_key_path into the base config. Example:

module "base" {
  [...]
  ssh_key_path = "~/.ssh/id_mbologna_terraform.pub"
  [...]
}

The ssh_key_path option can also be specified on a per-host basis. In this case, the key specified is treated as an additional key, copied to the machine as well as the ssh_key_path specified in the base section.

If you don't want to copy any ssh key at all (and use passwords instead), just supply an empty file (eg. ssh_key_path = "/dev/null").

Provided your host is on the same network segment of the virtual machines you can access them via:

ssh [email protected]

You can add the following lines to ~/.ssh/config to avoid checking hosts and specifying a username:

Host *.tf.local
StrictHostKeyChecking no
UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
User root

Web access is on standard ports, so firefox suma3pg.tf.local will work as expected. SUSE Manager default user is admin with password admin.

Avahi can be disabled if it is not needed (bridged networking mode, all VMs with static MAC addresses and names known in advance). In that case use the following variables in the base module:

use_avahi = false
domain = "mgr.suse.de"

mirror

If you are using sumaform outside of the SUSE network you can choose to add a special extra virtual machine named mirror that will cache packages downloaded from the SUSE engineering network for faster access and lower bandwidth consumption.

It will be be used exclusively by other VMs to download SUSE content - that means your SUSE Manager servers, clients, minions and proxies will be "fully disconnected", not requiring Internet access to operate.

To enable mirror, add mirror = "mirror.tf.local" to the base section in main.tf and add the following mode definition:

module "mirror" {
  source = "./modules/libvirt/mirror"
  base_configuration = "${module.base.configuration}"

  data_pool = "data"
}

Note you are encouraged to specify an additional libvirt storage pool name (data in the example above). Downloaded content will be placed on a separate disk in this pool - it helps SUSE Manager performance significantly if the pool is mapped onto a different physical disk. You can configure a pool with virt-manager like in the following image:

Omitting the data_pool variable results in the default "default" storage pool being used.

Note that mirror must be populated before any host can be deployed - by default its cache is refreshed nightly via cron, you can also schedule a one-time refresh via the /root/mirror.sh script.

Customize virtual hardware

You can add the following parameters to a modules/libvirt/host module in main.tf to customize its virtual hardware:

• memory = <N> to set the machine's RAM to N MiB
• vcpu = <N> to set the number of virtual CPUs

Keep a VM turned off

You can add running = false to any libvirt host to keep it turned off. This is useful if you want to keep the instance around (ie. not destroying it) but not to consume resources.

Only upload a subset of available images

By default all known base OS images are uploaded to the libvirt host (currently several versions of SLES and CentOS). It is possible to limit the OS selection in order to avoid wasting space and bandwidth, if the needed OSs are known a priori.

In order to do that use the images variable in the base module, like in the following example:

module "base" {
  source = "./modules/libvirt/base"

  ...
  images = ["centos7", "sles12sp2"]
}

The list of all supported images is available in "modules/libvirt/base/main.tf".