How to use the new virsh provider in Foreman 1.4

This morning I decided to play with a new Foreman 1.4 feature : TFTP, DHCP and DNS provider for my local workstation : virsh.
Virsh provider allow you to manage DHCP and DNS libvirt’s network (via dnsmasq) for some local development. It allow to have a full provisioning workflow without having to install bind, tftpd and dhcpd.

This post is hugely inspired from Foreman 1.4 manual.

Libvirt configuration

The first thing to do is to define a persistent virtual network in libvirt.
Copy in a file named net-defintion.xml. You can off course change the network name, ip range, domain name, etc …

$ cat net-defintion.xml
<network>
 <name>default</name>
 <uuid>16b7b280-7462-428c-a65c-5753b84c7545</uuid>
 <forward mode='nat'>
 <nat>
 <port start='1024' end='65535'/>
 </nat>
 </forward>
 <bridge name='virbr0' stp='on' delay='0'/>
 <mac address='52:54:00:b2:fa:27'/>
 <domain name='fitzdsl.local'/>
 <ip address='192.168.122.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
 <tftp root='/tftp'/>
 <dhcp>
 <range start='192.168.122.2' end='192.168.122.254'/>
 <bootp file='pxelinux.0'/>
 </dhcp>
 </ip>
</network>

Then, you need to create and start the default network on libvirt:

# virsh net-define --file net-definition.xml
# virsh net-start default

We need to setup the TFTP directory (from Foreman manual for Fedora) :

mkdir -p /var/tftproot/{boot,pxelinux.cfg}
yum -y install syslinux
cp /usr/share/syslinux/{pxelinux.0,menu.c32,chain.c32} /var/tftproot
chgrp -R nobody /var/tftproot
find /var/tftproot/ -type d | xargs chmod g+s

Smart-Proxy configuration

We need now to configure a local smart-proxy to manage TFTP, DNS and DHCP:
We should now configure the local smart-proxy to use this new provider:
Set the following:

:tftp: true
:tftproot: /var/tftproot
:tftp_servername: 192.168.122.1
:dns: true
:dns_provider: virsh
:dhcp: true
:dhcp_vendor: virsh
:virsh_network: default

Finaly make sure your smart-proxy can have sudo rights :

Defaults !requiretty
foreman-proxy ALL=/usr/bin/virsh

Foreman configuration

First you need to add your proxy or refresh the feature list:

In Infrastructure:
New proxy : http://localhost:8443

Then you need to create a new domain and subnet :

• Create a new domain : name it accordingly to your “domain name” on the net-defintion.xml.
• Create a new subnet accordingly to you net-definition file.

In my case:

Name: Home
Network address: 192.168.122.0
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Start IP Range: 192.168.122.2
Stop IP Range: 192.168.122.255

• In Domains tab check the domain you just created.
• In Proxies tab select your new proxy for DHCP, TFTP and DNS.

Create a new VM

When creating a new host, take care to select in “Virtual Machine” Tab on Network Interfaces:

• Network Type => Virtual (NAT)
• Network => “default”

You have now the ability to setup in local full provisioning environment. The only missing thing is that the PTR DNS record is not setup.

Great thanks to Lukas (@lzap) who implemented this new great feature !