oVirt Engine - squeezed into a container

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oVirt Engine provides the web-based management interface (webadmin) in oVirt. In addition it communicates with postgresql to maintain the database of all the involved entities. And it is based on JBoss and can be installed on Fedora or CentOS.

This kind of application is perfectly suited for containers

  • well - you’ve probably heard of them.

Well, as it’s suitable I gave it a go - I’m not the first one who gave it a go, Moran also did this. My work is similar to his, I just tried to leverage some enhancements which popped up in the last 6 months - mainly the integration with the atomic command and a simpler integration with systemd.

The image is based on this Dockerfile and this atomic installation script to perform the engine setup on deployment.

With the atomic command the usage is quite easy:

atomic install fabiand/ovirt-engine-3.5
# or
ADMINPW=foo atomic install fabiand/ovirt-engine-3.5

With docker it’s a few more lines:

export IMAGE=docker.io/fabiand/ovirt-engine-3.5
export NAME=ovirt-engine-3.5

# Use a transient (--rm) container to create the real the container
docker run --rm -v /:/host \
  -e FQDN=$(hostname) \
  -e ADMINPASSWORD=${ADMINPW:-ovirt} \
  -e NAME=$NAME \
  -e IMAGE=$IMAGE \
  $IMAGE container/atomic-install.sh

(Note: You can also use docker inspect -f '' docker.io/fabiand/ovirt-engine-3.5 to retrieve the correct commandline directly from the image)

After this run you can access oVirt Engine on port 80 and 443 of that host.

However, there are still some unclean or open ends:

  • Take care of upgrades
  • Find a nicer way to set the admin password
  • For now postgres is bundled
  • Static vs dynamic ports
  • Use the latest oVirt bits
  • …

::: {#footer} [ June 4th, 2015 12:37pm ]{#timestamp} [ovirt]{.tag} [engine]{.tag} [container]{.tag} [fedora]{.tag} [centos]{.tag} [postgresql]{.tag} [atomic]{.tag} :::