Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Field Notes: Installing Virtual Machine Driver Pack for RHEL 5

The SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack (or VMDP) is a set of drivers that enhances the disk and network I/O of a fully virtualized (FV) virtual machine.

I was installing VMDP on SLES 10 SP2 this week at a customer site. They have a fully-virtualized (FV) RHEL 5.2 (i386) domU. The documentation on how to install this is fairly straight forward and can be found at this LINK.

Here are some additional stuff I did to complete the task:

1. Mounting the virtual CD-ROM

I could use virt-manager (GUI) to mount the 2Mb ISO file for RHEL 5 32 bit from the /opt/novell/ directories. However, from within the RHEL domU, the CD-ROM icon appears on the desktop but double-clicking it launches the CD/DVD Creator software!!?? It appears that RHEL thinks the mounted virtual CD-ROM is blank. jelir I had to use the terminal to figure out, with fdisk -l, that the mounted virtual CD-ROM is /dev/hdc. I then manually mounted this at /mnt/cdrom using the mount -t iso9660 -t ro,loop /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom.

2. Installing the 2 rpms fails because the default RHEL install does not have the rpm-build package

Yep, installing the 2 VMDP RPMs will fail with the error "cannot create /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES". It appears that the rpm-build packages are not installed with a default install of RHEL. Easily resolved by mounting the RHEL 5.2 DVD and installed the rpm-build package. senyum

Done.

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