Another presentation from RHVE 2009. This one is entitled, "The Sky is the Limit: Building your Own Cloud Infrastructure using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization" by Hugh Brock and Jan Mark Holzer of Red Hat.

Another presentation from RHVE 2009. This one is entitled, "Secure Virtualization using SELinux" by Dan Walsh of Red Hat.

Another presentation from RHVE 2009. This one is entitled, "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization" by Navin Thadani who is a big wig at Red Hat. It is from the business track and higher level view.

Another presentation from RHVE 2009. This one is entitled, "Red Hat Virtualization: Breaking Performance and Scalability Barriers" by John Shaksober and Vijay Tehran of Red Hat.

I downloaded all of the videos offered from the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009. They made them available as Ogg Theora .ogv files so I didn't even have to convert them. They are of moderate to low quality especially with regards to audio... so they can be a little annoying but the presentation material is generally top notch.

In this video, Andrew Cathrow of Red Hat spends about 23 minute explaining what KVM.

Main HallRed Hat held the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 today and it was awesome. What was it? It was a completely online conference that offered everything you'd find at a traditional face-to-face show like the annual Red Hat Summit.

I was hoping Red Hat would use this event to introduce / announce RHEV for Desktops but no such luck. I guess we'll have to continue to wait until January.

Virtual Areas

• Conference Center - 15 presentations in three tracks with live video, audio and slides including chat submitted questions from the audience
• Exhibition Hall - 3 regions, US region had 14 vendors with staffed booths offering public and private chat
• Resource Center - 15 background items (PDF and Flash videos)
• Birds-of-a-Feather - 4 Topics
• Networking Cafe - Chat center with presenters and guests
• Help Desk - Section for help with the virtual experience usage

Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers on November 3rd. A couple of weeks before the release, I emailed Red Hat media relations contact Kerrin Catallozzi and asked for an interview with some Red Hat employees regarding Red Hat Enteprise Virtualization.

It took a several weeks to get the answers back mainly because the official product release happened... and after I had the chance to download, print and read the documentation, most of my questions had been answered... and I ended up coming up with all new questions. Kerrin found Andy Cathrow (Product Marketing Manager) and Jim Brennan (Senior Product Marketing Manager) of Red Hat to provide the answers. Andy Cathrow will be referred to as "AC" and Jim Brennan will be referred to as "JB".

[Update: - Dec. 9, 2009 - I got a chance to chat with Andy and Jim in real-time and ask several additional questions at the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 online conference. See the comment below the main interview for a transcript.]

Shorewall and Proxmox VE Cluster Configuration

This is a follow up article describing how to use Proxmox VE and Shorewall together. This article focus on using Shorewall within your Proxmox cluster. If you have not read the first article I recommend that you do so, it will aid your understanding with what is going in this one.

Network Layout and Shorewall Configuration

We are going to be using a bridging configuration. This is what Proxmox VE uses with by default. Bridging allows for easy migration of hosts without having to re-configure the firewall each time a machine is migrated.

I haven't seen it mentioned on Slashdot or LWN yet... and I even emailed LWN informing them... but Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers and the accompanying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor products today. There are a slew of press releases and demo videos. They even had a webcast press conference. Oh, and hey, they also released all of the manuals too.

Didn't we see this coming?

Those who have been paying attention were expecting these releases... but I must admit that once I learned the details, I was shocked. Why? Because the Management side of the product requires Microsoft Windows products. What products? Windows Server 2003 is needed to run the management server. What services is the Windows Server running? IIS, Microsoft SQL Server, and it'll need to be connected to a Microsoft Active Directory Server for authentication and management.

Then of course once you have the proper Windows environment established you can actually install the RHELfS management app provided by Red Hat. Oh, if you don't have your own Microsoft SQL Server setup already, they can install the Express edition for you.

The Management server software includes a local management client app you can run on the management server but it also has a web-based version of the management app for remote management. Yeah, at last open standards! Not so fast. What browsers are supported by the web-based management app? Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and up. Other browsers (according to the docs) are "untested". What? They haven't even tested them? What, you aren't curious if Firefox works? To clarify it appears as if the web-based management app sends Active-X based content to the web client... and that .Net technology is also used.

Ok, after reading those last few paragraphs, I'm guessing you are shocked too.

Proxmox VE does not come with a firewall by default there are several solutions to this problem but the most flexible and robust is integrating the Shorewall firewall. This document assumes a basic knowledge of the Shorewall program and will not cover all of Shorewall capabilities but will give you a good working model to get you started. For more advanced topics check out the Shorewall documentation.

Shorewall will have 3 zones: 1) the fw zone which is the Proxmox host, 2) the net zone which is the Internet and 3) the dmz zone which is where the virtual machines will reside. The hardware just has one network interface card; vmbr0 is a just a bridge interface.