Guest creation
We have set up the disk storage elements required for our new virtual machine. We are now ready to create the Guest.
Open the "Guest/Host/Pool" section of the client, and right click on "Unassigned Guests", and then on "New Guest". Alternatively, click on the button with the Guest Icon (blue ball on a box). It is located under the "File" menu item.
Enter "myGuest" as the guest name. Then select the Operating System Distribution that you plan to install on the Guest, or the most similar from the list. This selection is used by the wizard to choose the kind of virtual hardware (virtual network card, virtual disk controller, ...) that the virtual machine will have on creation.
Click "Next".
In this screen we can configure the virtual hardware of our Guest.
Choose the amount of virtual CPUs and Ram that you want this Guest to use.
In the "Description" field you can enter a descriptive text stating the intended use of the machine, or note down whatever information that you consider useful related to this Guest.
The kind of disk controller, audio, etcetera is selected by the wizard, based on the OS that you selected in the previous step, an the kind of hardware that different OS's support on installation. You shouldn't change these, unless you perfectly know what you are doing. Changing these settings to values not supported by your OS, can make your Guest OS installation to fail.
Last, you can select the virtual bridge this Guest will be connected to. It was created with by flexConfig during server configuration. In this installation we leave it as is.
All these settings can be changed later (before or after installation of the Guest O.S.), if a different resource set is required.
Now click "Next".
Now we will configure the disk of our Guest.
In the previous chapter we configured a Volume called myVolume, that we will now use to store the virtual disk image of our Guest. Now, to create the new virtual Disk Image, click on "New image".
To select the Volume where the Disk Image will be created, open "myImageStorage", and select the Volume "myVolume" which is inside. Click "Next".
Now enter "myGuestImage" as the name for the Disk Image. Enter the size of the Disk Image for your Guest (40 GB should be enough for any simple OS installation, but check your OS installation requirements), an click "Finish" to create the image in the selected Volume.
Select the newly created image "myGuestDiskImage", and click "Next".
Direct Storage allows Guests to directly access physical disks attached to the Hosts. We won't use them in this simple installation, and we have not defined a Direct Storage, so there is nothing selectable here. Just click "Next".
Select "myMediaStorage" in the drop down list in the upper right corner. You will see a list of the ISO files contained in the Media Storage. Select the image file of the OS that you want to install. The selected image file will appear in the list in the bottom of the window. Click "Next".
Now you are presented with a summary of the configuration of the Guest you are about to create. Review it, and if everything is right, click "Finish".
You have created your first Guest with flexVMClient. The red circle with a white square in the icon, indicates that it is stopped. In the next step we will start it.
Assign the Guest to a Pool
A pool is defined as a set of (one or more) Hosts that have access to common disk storage, so they can indistinctly run the Guests within that storage.
The Hosts provide the Guests with the hardware CPUs and memory they need to run on. We must assign our Guest to a Pool so that it can run on the Hosts of the Pool.
In our example, we will assign our guest to the only Pool in our installation; it is called "default", and is created by flexConfig on install. Expand "Pools", so you can see the Pool called "default".
Now right look for "myGuest"; it is not assigned to any Pool yet, so it appears under "Unassigned Guests". Right click on "myGuest".
In the pop over menu that appears, you will see "Start" option is disabled; a Guest can not be started until it is assigned to a Pool.
Click on "Assign Pool". A new window will open.
Select the "default" Pool, and click "Finish". Now the Guest machine has all the resources needed to start.
Starting the guest
Simply right click on the Guest (we moved it to "default" Pool in the previous step, so it is shown there in the Data Center tree) and click on "Start".
You have just asked flexManager to start a Virtual Machine. This operation takes several seconds to complete, but you didn't have to wait that time to go on managing your infrastructure. flexVMClient does not make you wait until the operations you request complete; instead, you can immediately continue using the program because all communication between flexClient and flexManager is asynchronous. As a result, sometimes the information you see on your screen is not completely up to date, as it can take some seconds to be refreshed. If you want to see the latest state of you can click on the "Refresh" button (the green arrow in the right top corner of the Data Center tree) to refresh all the information about your infrastructure.
Connecting to the Guest
Now you will want to access the console of your new Guest. When a Guest is started, the "Open Console" option is enabled. You can click on it, and a new window will open.
Congratulations! You have succesfully created your Guest, and you have opened its system console. You can proceed with Operating system installation now.