Chapter 5. Installing the console from the virtual appliance

Red Hat Gluster Storage Console provides a virtual appliance that can be used to quickly set up a pre-installed and partially configured Red Hat Gluster Storage Console. This also enables offline installation of the Red Hat Gluster Storage Console on virtual machines managed by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Management.

5.1. Installing the virtual appliance on a virtual machine

This section covers how to install Red Hat Gluster Storage Console on a virtual machine managed by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.
The basic workflow for this process is:
  1. Obtain the Red Hat Gluster Storage Console Appliance and upload it to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Management.
  2. Create a virtual machine to act as a server for Red Hat Gluster Storage Console, using the Red Hat Gluster Storage Console Appliance OVA file as a template.
  3. Boot the new virtual machine and run the setup script.
If necessary, you can then register the virtual machine with Red Hat Subscription Management to allow that machine to receive updates from Red Hat.

Important

Support for offline installation of Red Hat Gluster Storage Console is currently limited to the installation of Red Hat Gluster Storage Console Appliance on a virtual machine managed by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Management.

5.1.1. Before you begin

To perform the following procedures you will need an installation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.

5.1.2. Install Red Hat Gluster Storage Console on a RHEV-M virtual machine

Procedure 5.1. Uploading the appliance into Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager

This only needs to be done once for a single instance of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.

  1. Download the appliance package

    On the Red Hat Customer Portal, search for and download the rhgsc-appliance package.

  2. Upload the appliance to RHEV-M

    Upload the appliance OVA file from /path/to/appliance.ova to a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager storage domain. 
    # rhevm-image-uploader -n appliance_name -e rhevm_storage_domain upload /path/to/appliance.ova
    Enter the REST API password for the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager administrative user (admin@internal) when prompted.

Procedure 5.2. Creating a virtual machine with the appliance template

  1. Start creating a new virtual machine

    Log in to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager interface and navigate to the Virtual Machines tab in the navigation pane.
    Click New VM to start the creation process.

  2. Use the appliance as a template

    Follow the prompts, ensuring that you select appliance_name in the Based on Template drop-down menu.

Procedure 5.3. Configuring the console appliance virtual machine

  1. Ensure spice-xpi is installed

    Ensure that spice-xpi is installed on your local system so that you can view the console of your new virtual machine.

  2. Start the new virtual machine

    When your new virtual machine is finished installing, start the virtual machine.

  3. Configure the new virtual machine

    Open the console of your new virtual machine. Run the rhsc-setup command and follow the prompts to complete setup of Red Hat Gluster Storage.
    By default, rhsc-setup runs in the online mode. This requires registration to Red Hat Network channels or repositories. Follow the steps in Section 4.1, “Registering to Red Hat Network” to register with Red Hat Network and subscribe to the appropriate channels and repositories.
    If your system has limited connectivity, or you don't want to configure repositories now, you can run this command in the offline mode: 
    # rhsc-setup --offline
    If you are configuring a number of machines the same way, you can also use the --config-append parameter to use a pre-configured answers file.
    When setup is complete, you can follow the normal process of setting up bricks, volumes, and trusted storage pools. If you set up in offline mode, you can also optionally register Red Hat Gluster Storage Console for updates by following the instructions in Section 4.1, “Registering to Red Hat Network”.