Once flexVDI 3.0 is installed, you need to apply a basic configuration to your first host, and create a flexVDI Manager instance to get all your physical resources under control. This operation is done with flexvdi-config, a text based tool which allows you to easily accomplish these tasks.
The flexVDI Software Suite consists of several distributed components that communicate through TCP/IP connections. This means you need to make sure your firewall rules allow this communication. However, CentOS 7.4 and RHEL 7.4 come with firewall rules that disallow incoming connections to most TCP ports by default, governed by the firewalld system service. The flexVDI Config tool cannot reliably check that the required network ports are open, so you have to check it by yourself. Alternatively, a common alternative is to completely disable the firewalld service and rely on network-wide filtering. The network ports used by different components of the flexVDI Software Suits are the following:
/etc/flexvdi/flexvdi-gateway.conf
.Of this list, only port TCP 443 must be reachable by flexVDI Clients. Ports 5900 and up have to be reachable by flexVDI Dashboard to show guest consoles to the system administrator. The rest can be made reachable only by other hosts of the platform and the Manager.
flexVDI Config main menu shows the following options:
The first submenu of the flexVDI Config tool will help you configure the network settings. Note that it does not do anything that could not be done with the regular Linux tools. It just helps you configure the network in the way flexVDI expects it so that virtual machines can be connected among them and with other computers. flexVDI Config will write these settings to the ifcfg-xxx
scripts in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
so that they are applied on every boot.
flexVDI organizes guests in subnets with the help of virtual bridges. A virtual bridge communicates virtual machines among them, as if they were in the same network segment. Also, they can communicate with the outside if one of the host's physical interfaces is also attached to that virtual bridge. With the flexvdi-config
tool, you can manage virtual bridges, setup bonds and local VLAN interfaces, and configure the TCP/IP information of them all. In this first basic configuration we are going to create a single virtual bridge (vibr0) with two physical interface attached to it (enp2s0 and enp3s0) through a bonding interface (bond0), and configure an IP address:
When you select Network in the main menu, you will be presented with the following options:
The first options lets you set up bonds among several physical interfaces. This feature enables the use of multiple network cards as if there was just one. flexVDI Config allows you to configure two different bonding modes:
Create a bonding interface only if you have more than one physical interfaces that want to cooperate in one of these two ways. To create a bonding with two network interfaces, follow these steps in flexVDI Config:
A new network interface named bondN will be created, where N is the bonding number starting at 0.Now you have to attach slave devices to this interface:
From this menu, you can also remove physical interfaces from the bonding with the Dettach option, or delete it completely with the Delete option.
flexVDI attaches virtual machines to bridges so that they can communicate. Follow these steps in order to create a bridge:
You will be informed that a new network bridge named virbr0 has been created. Upon returning to the screen of network bridges, you will see you have a new bridge with that name, without any assigned slave. An isolated network bridge like that can be useful to define a subnet of virtual machines without direct access to the outside.
In order to attach a physical interface to the virtual bridge, just follow these steps:
Like with bondings, you can also remove network interfaces from the bridge with the Dettach option, or delete it completely with the Delete option.
In a complex network configuration, it may be interesting to separate network traffic in different VLANs. The LocalVLAN option lets you define interfaces that let the host access a VLAN on a virtual bridge. This step only provides VLAN access to the host, and does not provide VLAN access to the flexVDI Manager or other virtual machines, which will have to be configured separately. More on how to configure VLAN access for virtual machines in the First Steps with the Dashboard guide. Here, we are going to show how to provide the host with access to VLAN 8:
To create a local VLAN interface on virbr0, follow these steps:
A new network interface is created with the name virbr0.id, where id is the VLAN identifier; in our example, virbr0.8. Thus, through this interface the host is now able to access the VLAN on that virtual bridge.
The TCP/IP submenu lets you define the IP network parameters associated with each interface. We will configure the network bridge virbr0 so that the host can access the Internet through it. This will allow us to update the host and download the flexVDI Manager image later. If you created a local VLAN interface in the previous step, configure that interface instead.
Finally, the DNS option of the Network menu allows you to configure DNS servers for host name resolution. Simply enter the DNS option, and configure the address of the name servers you want to use.
Once you have finished the previous steps, the network settings of your first flexVDI Host have been defined. To apply this configuration, you must leave the Network menu. Then flexVDI Config will notify you that the network settings have changed and it is required to restart the network service for the changes to take effect. Confirm that you want to perform the operation.