Installation on existing Debian and Routed Networking

[kevinelliott]

Greetings,

I'm interested in using Proxmox VE, but I have a couple of questions that I hope you guys could help me answer first:

1) Would it be possible to install Proxmox VE on an existing (but fresh) installation of Debian 4 or 5? My dedicated server ISP does not give us the ability to use arbitrary ISOs (so the bare metal option is out), but do give us a control panel to dynamically reprovision the OS on the system. I have many choices, such as gentoo, centos, or debian.

2) Can OpenVZ and KVM be configured so that the VMs are using network routing instead of bridging? My ISP does not allow me to use any other MAC address other than the physical one, otherwise they automatically disable my switch port on their router. They do this to prevent people from performing man-in-the-middle attacks by spoofing MAC addresses. So, if a virtual machine presents itself with a new MAC address, I will very quickly be disabled and have no network connectivity until I call them. I also receive additional IPs that are not part of congruent network blocks, so I can't just route a whole block to each VM. Using regular vanilla Xen, I was able to configure the xend to use network routing instead of bridge by disabling the network bridge scripts, and enabling the network routing scripts. These scripts seemed to enable ip_forwarding and proxy_arp in the kernel, and then IPs were bound to the primary interface. Can this be done with Proxmox VE?

Thanks,

Kevin

 

[dietmar]

1) Would it be possible to install Proxmox VE on an existing (but fresh) installation of Debian 4 or 5?

http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Lenny

2) Can OpenVZ and KVM be configured so that the VMs are using network routing instead of bridging?

Yes. Simply do not connect 'vmbr0' to the physical network. AFAIK people at OVH are doing that - maybe one of them can give more details?

 

[kevinelliott]

Greetings,

1) Would it be possible to install Proxmox VE on an existing (but fresh) installation of Debian 4 or 5? My dedicated server ISP does not give us the ability to use arbitrary ISOs (so the bare metal option is out), but do give us a control panel to dynamically reprovision the OS on the system. I have many choices, such as gentoo, centos, or debian.

My ISP only had Debian Etch, but I followed the guide at http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-upgrade-debian-linux-4etch-to-5lenny-server.html to upgrade it immediately to Debian Lenny. Then I followed the directions at http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Lenny as directed by dietmar.

After rebooting into the new pve kernel, I was getting a notice on the Create vm page that I did not have KVM enabled. I was shocked, since I knew the host supported the virtual extensions (evidenced by existence of 'svm' in /proc/cpuinfo. Further examination showed that there were NO KVM errors in dmesg, and the kvm-amd kernel module was loading successfully (both kvm-amd and kvm existed in lsmod).

Later I figured out that /dev/kvm did not exist. Wow, why was the kernel modules not creating it?

I stumbled on a post on the kvm-devel mailing list from 2007 that a user did not have /dev/kvm, but should have. His solution was to mknod the device.

So, I did that.

srv2:/var/log# cat /sys/class/misc/kvm/dev
10:232
srv2:/var/log# mknod /dev/kvm c 10 232

After doing that, KVM was an available option in the proxmox ve interface.

Any ideas why this happened? Was it the Debian upgrade that prevented KVM from having the device?

-Kevin