Spinning up the Trilio VM

The Trilio Appliance is delivered as qcow2 image and runs as VM on top of a KVM Hypervisor.

This guide shows the tested way to spin up the Trilio Appliance on a RHV Cluster. Please contact a RHV Administrator and Trilio Customer Success Agent in case of incompatibility with company standards.

Creating the cloud-init image

The Trilio appliance is utilizing cloud-init to provide the initial network and user configuration.

Cloud-init is reading it's information either from a metadata server or from a provided cd image. Trilio is utilizing the cd image.

Needed tools

To create the cloud-init image it is required to have genisoimage available.

#For RHEL and centos
yum install genisoimage
#For Ubuntu 
apt-get install genisoimage

Providing the Metadata

Cloud-init is using two files for it's metadata.

The first file is called meta-data and contains the information about the network configuration. Below is an example of this file.

[root@kvm]# cat meta-data
instance-id: triliovault
network-interfaces: |
   auto ens3
   iface ens3 inet static
   address 158.69.170.20
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   gateway 158.69.170.30

   dns-nameservers 11.11.0.51
local-hostname: tvault-controller

The instance-id has to match the VM name in virsh

The second file is called user-data and contains little scripts and information to set up for example the user passwords. Below is an example of this file.

[root@kvm]# cat user-data
#cloud-config
chpasswd:
  list: |
    root:password1
    stack:password2
  expire: False

creating the image file

Both files meta-data and user-data are needed. Even when one is empty, is it needed to create a working cloud-init image.

The image is getting created using genisoimage follwing this general command:

genisoimage -output <name>.iso -volid cidata -joliet -rock </path/user-data> </path/meta-data>

An example of this command is shown below.

genisoimage  -output tvault-firstboot-config.iso -volid cidata -joliet -rock user-data meta-data

Spining up the Trilio appliance

The Trilio Appliance qcow2 image can be downloaded from the Trilio customer portal. Please contact your Trilio sales or technical lead to get access to the portal.

After the cloud-init image has been created the TriloVault appliance can be spun up on the desired KVM server.

See below an example command, how to spin up the Trilio appliance using virsh and the created iso image.

virt-install -n triliovault-vm  --memory 24576 --vcpus 8 \
--os-type linux \ 
--disk tvault-appliance-os-3.0.154.qcow2,device=disk,bus=virtio,size=40 \
--network bridge=virbr0,model=virtio \
--network bridge=virbr1,model=virtio \
--graphics none \
--import \
--disk path=tvault-firstboot-config.iso,device=cdrom

It is of course possible to spin up the Trilio appliance without a cloud-init iso-image. It will spin up with default values.

Uninstalling cloud-init after first boot

Once the Trilio appliance is up and running with it's initial configuration is it recommended to uninstall cloud-init.

If cloud-init is not installed it will rerun the network configuration upon every boot. Setting the network configuration back to DHCP, if no metadata is provided.

To uninstall cloud-init, follow the example below.

sudo apt-get purge cloud-init