Node-Wizard & Node-Client

Version 0.1.0

We recently released two pieces of software: node-wizard and node client. They can be downloaded at https://gitlab.com/cluster-wizard/release.

Node-Wizard is a GRPC server and a Node-Client is a GRPC client that talks to Node-Wizards. The basic functionality of Node-Wizard is VM life-cycle management on a host using KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). It enables users to

• List VMs
• Create/Delete VMs
• Start/Shutdown/Destroy VMs
• Attach/Detach disks, network device (bridge/virtual function), GPUs
• Create/Delete/Rollback-to local snapshots
• Create templates and clones
• Allow VNC access and Domain XML information

The VM creation is through auto-installation. Users do not need to attend the installation process. Users need to provide a minimal set of information.

• Name of VM
• Resource (number of cores, size of memory, disk size)
• Network (DHCP or IP address with default gateway and DNS)
• User information (username, password, ssh public key)

The supported Operating Systems are

• Ubuntu 20.04
• Ubuntu 22.04
• Redhat 9.2
• Rocky 9.2
• SUSE Linux 15 SP 5

Node-Wizard is a part of Cluster Wizard Project. Cluster-Wizard supports a Ceph storage as VM image storage.

To create a VM whose image is in a Ceph cluster, you need to create a libvirt-pool. The steps on how to configure such a pool is described in Ceph RBD for Virtual Machine Images article. However, the KVMs in Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 do not support subsequent operations like taking snapshots.

Technically, you can create a VM backed by Ceph storage with Node-Wizard as long as a pool is set up and its name is given to Node-Wizard. However, some features such as snapshots, templates and clone cannot be used on such a VM.