Virtualization With LNST

LNST is targeted primarily at physical machines and testing on real hardware. However, sometimes you don't have the time and/or resources to prepare the desired networking setup. Or perhaps you would like to rapidly test a lot of various network configurations and setups without any manual intervention. These are the times when virtualization comes to play. LNST can work with virtual machines just as well as with your physical ones, and if you meet certain conditions, LNST can handle automatically many more tasks than it ever could with physical machines. This page will explain how to configure LNST to take the full advantage of this feature.

How does it work?

LNST is integrated with libvirt and in case you use it for running your guests, LNST is able to configure the entire network topology automatically, based on the requirements of the recipe being run. The implementation takes advantage from the fact, that libvirt allows dynamic hot-plugging of new network interfaces to already running domains. This means you only have to prepare the VMs and LNST will dynamically create and destroy connections between them as it executes different recipes. Pretty neat, huh? The next section will describe the few steps you need to take to get this working properly.

How to make it work for you?

• the machines must be all on the controller
• they must have the controller interface configured properly
• lnst-ctl must be run as root

Adding the Machine to Your Pool

• libvirt_domain
• No test interfaces. Example.
• Your pool can be mixed.
• If your pool is mixed and contains both virtual and physical machines, lnst-ctl will first try to find a matching physical setup. In case it fails to do so, it will try to setup a virtual network based on the recipe requirements.