Monthly Archives: March 2015

Linux VMs on Hyper-V – be sure to install and run hyperv-daemons!

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A short post, just to say that if you are running Linux VMs on Hyper-V hypervisors you really should install and run the hyperv daemons.

On RHEL7-based distros this leads to :

yum install hyperv-daemons
systemctl enable hypervvssd
systemctl enable hypervkvpd

Ubuntu users should install the packages specified on this Microsoft TechNet page (I’ve not tested this myself, as I don’t yet have any Ubuntu VMs on Hyper-V).

Once you’ve done this a whole host of important features will work, including:

  • Live migration of VMs
  • IP injection (?)
  • Dynamic memory sizing
  • etc..

This will avoid any surprise reboots when hypervisor nodes are taken down for maintenance (which is what happened to me before I installed these..).
Obviously the complete failure of a hypervisor will still cause VM downtime,

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to use configuration management to add these to all their Hyper-V VMs automatically 🙂

Further reading : Best Practices for running Linux on Hyper-V

soc::puppet – A puppet themed social event for UoB (Thursday 19th March)

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What: soc::puppet is a puppet themed meet up for University of Bristol Staff using, or interested in puppet configuration management  (rather than actual marionettes or glove puppets)
Where: Brambles in The Hawthorns (see the link for details)
When: 5pm-7pm(ish) Thursday 19th March 2015

There’s a growing community of people around the University of Bristol using (or interested in using) puppet configuration management http://puppetlabs.com Some of those people are talking to eachother, and some just don’t know who to talk to yet!

Experience, use case and scale of implementation varies widely, but we’ve all got something to share! 🙂

With that in mind, there seems to be interest in an informal gathering of interested people, where we can get together, share ideas and build a local puppet community.  Bringing together all those informal corridor/tearoom chats and spreading the exciting ideas/knowledge around in a loose, informal manner.

As a first pass, we’ve booked “Brambles” which is the new name for the Staff Club space in The Hawthorns, for a couple of hours after work on Thursday 19th March.  If it goes well, it will hopefully turn into a regular event.

Our initial aim is to make it as informal as possible (hence doing it outside work hours, no pressure to minute it, assign actions, instigate formalised project teams etc) and treat it mostly as an exercise in putting people in touch with other people who are playing with similar toys.

That said, there are a few “bits of business” to take care of at the first meeting, so I’m suggesting the following as a vague agenda.

  1. Welcome!  What’s this about? (about 5 minutes)
  2. Introductions, very quick “round table” to introduce everyone, and say what level of exposure they’ve had to puppet so far (about 10 minutes)
  3. Everything beyond this point will be decided on the day.  If you’ve got something you’d like to talk about or present on, bring it with you!
  4. We’ll close the session with a very quick “should we do this again?” and “call for volunteers”

If people are interested, we can move on to a pub afterwards to continue the discussion.

The facilities available are a bit limited, and apparently the projector isn’t available at the moment, but we’ll see what direction it takes – and as they say in Open Space circles, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have, be prepared to be surprised!”