Tag Archives: Illumos

Installing OmniOS KVM/QEMU guest onto a Linux host zvol

I originally wanted to install Solaris x86 as a KVM guest, but had problems getting the network to function. The installation itself was easy enough, but all attempts to get networking to work failed. So I decided to try an Illumos distribution, as that would meet the requirements I was looking for.

Since OpenIndiana is the de facto Illumos distribution, I started with that. Unfortunately, it turned out to have the same problem. So I decided to try OmniOS, only to discover it too had the same problem. At this point, I wasn’t sure if it was my Linux KVM that was at fault, since three operating systems failed with the same problem. However, since I have several other operating systems running as KVM guests on Linux and they all work fine, I was still inclined to think it was the distro.

Neither Solaris x86 or OpenIndiana had any new updates, but my OmniOS distro was a little old – I had downloaded the OmniOS_Text_r151012.iso ISO sometime ago. So I checked and found a newer version – OmniOS_Text_r151014.iso. After downloading and installing it, I had a functional network! Based on this, I can only conclude that the reasons Solaris x86 and OpenIndiana failed are due to internal problems with those distros, and not some problem with Linux KVM. Either that or there is some magic KVM setting I’m not familiar with that is needed to get them to work (and I tried a bunch of them).

Installing OmniOS is pretty straight forward. Aside from answering a couple of questions, the installation is totally automatic. The only thing you need to do after installation is manually configure the network. Here are the commands I used to install OmniOS as a KVM guest under Linux.

Create the zvol:

zfs create -p -V 16G rpool/kvm/omnios11/disk0

Create the VM:

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host -m 8192M -drive format=raw,file=/dev/zvol/rpool/kvm/omnios11/disk0 -cdrom OmniOS_Text_r151014.iso -boot d -smp 2

Start the VM:

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host -m 8192M -drive format=raw,file=/dev/zvol/rpool/kvm/omnios11/disk0 -net nic,model=e1000,netdev=net0 -netdev tap,id=net0 -smp 2

Once the VM is started, login as root with no password and configure networking:

ipadm create-if e1000g0
ipadm create-addr -T static -a 172.16.0.175/16 e1000g0/v4
route -p add default 172.16.0.1
echo 'nameserver 172.16.0.10' >> /etc/resolv.conf
cp /etc/nsswitch.dns /etc/nsswitch.conf

You can find more information on setting up OmniOS here:

http://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/GeneralAdministration