Ongoing virt-who unreliability
For a utility that is essentially akin to license DRM, I was expecting that Red Hat would put some effort into making sure virt-who worked seamlessly to limit impact to end users.
I am now working through another list of issues with this tool which is stopping it from updating host to guest mappings in RHN which results in guests being marked as unlicensed. It appears something has broken recently and version 16 is currently returning the following error, without anything else meaningful/useful:
File "/usr/share/virt-who/manager/subscriptionmanager/subscriptionmanager.py", line 197, in hypervisorCheckIn
except rhsm_connection.RateLimitExceededException as e:
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'RateLimitExceededException'
I attempted to downgrade to version 12, it had a different error, then downgraded to version 10 and it stopped working altogether. In an attempt to resolve the issue (due to bugs found when searching for the errors) I attempted to build an RPM for version 17 from upstream and it appears that the build scripts for version 17 are now broken and no longer build cleanly on RHEL 6.
I am interested to know when I can expect an official build of version 17 for RHEL 6 from Red Hat? in the hope it will resolve the ongoing issues.
Is anyone currently using virt-who successfully? if so, which version, hypervisor and OS platform?
Responses
PixelDrift.NET Support,
Thanks for detailing your initial problem, diagnostic steps, and most importantly, your solution. With Satellite 6.2 we published the Virtual Instances Guide which details the configuration required for the 'virt-who' agent.
I will follow up the issue about the 'requires' information in the 'virt-who' package and, if needed, raise a Bugzilla ticket to have it updated.
PixelDrift.NET Support,
Further to my previous comment, I'm really curious about the errors you were seeing. If I understand correctly, you solved the issue by using the organisation's numeric ID, not the name, output by the command "subscription-manager identity".
This leads me to ask:
- Did you previously have the organisation's name specified in the configuration file for the "owner=" parameter? If so, what was the organisation's name, assuming you are willing to share that information?
- Can you provide the complete configuration file, perhaps before and after, minus any sensitive information?
If you would prefer not to share that information, I'll understand.
PixelDrift.NET Support,
It's a pity you can't confirm the state of the config file, but I've done similar troubleshooting, so completely understand.
On the topic of security, this has been raised elsewhere in the Discussions area, and it's a fair and reasonable question. I believe, though I would have to confirm, that the virt-who does retrieve the list of all VMs, regardless of operating system. I believe it's only after having retrieved the complete list that it then filters the list to only RHEL instances.
It is possible to restrict the scope of virt-who's data retrieval. One method requires that you grant access only to those hosts which support RHEL instances. If virt-who does not have access to specific VMs or hypervisors, it cannot retrieve their details. The other method involves configuring virt-who to either include or exclude specific hypervisors. For more details see 5.2.1. Limiting the Scope of virt-who Access.
Does this information help? I know it's not a complete answer, but it goes some way to answering your question.
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