KVM - Using the Advanced Virtualization Repo on EL8

NOTE: This is only relevant for RHEL 8.5 and older since the advanced virtualization repo was merged into the 'virt'-AppStream with the release of RHEL 8.6.

There's a full installation tutorial available here: KVM - Headless Server setup with Bonding, Bridging and LVM on AlmaLinux 8

If you're utilizing Alma or Rocky Linux 8 for an oVirt installation, you'll have to use the advanved-virtualization repo which is currently built by CentOS.

First disable the virt module. This will not remove any currently installed packages but just disable the package source where we get our libvirt and qemu-kvm packages:

 [archy@hyv01 ~]$ sudo dnf module disable virt

Next up, create the .repo file and let dnf source it. I'll use the CentOS Stable releases, but you could just aswell use the CentOS Stream version of this repo:

 [archy@hyv01 ~]$ sudo vim /etc/yum.repos.d/advanced-virtualization.repo

 [advanced-virtualization]  
 name=Advanced Virtualization from CentOS $releasever  
 baseurl=http://merlin.fit.vutbr.cz/mirrors/centos/$releasever/virt/$basearch/advanced-virtualization/  
 enabled=1  
 gpgcheck=0

 [archy@hyv01 ~]$ sudo dnf makecache

All you have to do now is run a simple update and yum / dnf will take care of the rest.

 [archy@hyv01 ~]$ sudo dnf -y update

In case anything goes haywire, a rollback can be performed by enabling the virt module again and undoing the last transaction.

 [archy@hyv01 ~]$ sudo dnf module enable virt  
 [archy@hyv01 ~]$ sudo dnf history undo last

After this completes, you'll be back at the start.

This switch can be performed without any interruption to the current running systems. In fact, I've had a server being provisioned by katello while running this transaction and everything went fine.

Feel free to comment and / or suggest a topic.

Comments

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