SUSE KVM Best Practices - Focus on SAP Workloads and Use Cases by roseswe

Description

SUSE Best Practices around KVM, especially for SAP workloads. Early Google presentation already made from various customer projects and SUSE sources.

Goals

• Complete presentation we can reuse in SUSE Consulting projects
• 2025: Bring it to version 1.00 ready for customers

Resources

KVM (virt-manager) images

SUSE/SAP/KVM Best Practices

• https://documentation.suse.com/en-us/sles/15-SP6/single-html/SLES-virtualization/
• SAP Note 1522993 - "Linux: SAP on SUSE KVM - Kernel-based Virtual Machine" && 2284516 - SAP HANA virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise hypervisors https://me.sap.com/notes/2284516
• SUSECon24: [TUTORIAL-1253] Virtualizing SAP workloads with SUSE KVM || https://youtu.be/PTkpRVpX2PM
• SUSE Best Practices for SAP HANA on KVM - https://documentation.suse.com/sbp/sap-15/html/SBP-SLES4SAP-HANAonKVM-SLES15SP4/index.html

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Q2Boot - A handy QEMU VM launcher by amanzini

Description

Q2Boot (Qemu Quick Boot) is a command-line tool that wraps QEMU to provide a streamlined experience for launching virtual machines. It automatically configures common settings like KVM acceleration, virtio drivers, and networking while allowing customization through both configuration files and command-line options.

The project originally was a personal utility in D, now recently rewritten in idiomatic Go. It lives at repository https://github.com/ilmanzo/q2boot

Goals

Improve the project, testing with different scenarios , address issues and propose new features. It will benefit of some basic integration testing by providing small sample disk images.

Resources

• https://github.com/ilmanzo/q2boot
• https://www.qemu.org/

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Extracting, converting and importing VMs from Nutanix into SUSE Virtualization by emendonca

Description

The idea is to delve into understanding Nutanix AHV internals on how it stores and runs VMs, and how to extract them in an automated way for importing into a KVM-compatible hypervisor, like SUSE Virtualization/Harvester. The final product will be not only be documentation, but a working prototype that can be used to automate the process.

Goals

1) document how to create a simple lab with NutaniX AHV community edition 2) determine the basic elements we need to interact with 3) determine what are the best paths to grab the images through, balancing speed and complexity 4) document possible issues and create a roadmap for tackling them 4) should we adapt an existing solution or implement a new one? 5) implement the solution!

Resources

Similar project I created: https://github.com/doccaz/vm-import-ui Nutanix AHV forums Nutanix technical bulletins

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Testing and adding GNU/Linux distributions on Uyuni by juliogonzalezgil

Join the Gitter channel! https://gitter.im/uyuni-project/hackweek

Uyuni is a configuration and infrastructure management tool that saves you time and headaches when you have to manage and update tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines. It also manages configuration, can run audits, build image containers, monitor and much more!

Currently there are a few distributions that are completely untested on Uyuni or SUSE Manager (AFAIK) or just not tested since a long time, and could be interesting knowing how hard would be working with them and, if possible, fix whatever is broken.

For newcomers, the easiest distributions are those based on DEB or RPM packages. Distributions with other package formats are doable, but will require adapting the Python and Java code to be able to sync and analyze such packages (and if salt does not support those packages, it will need changes as well). So if you want a distribution with other packages, make sure you are comfortable handling such changes.

No developer experience? No worries! We had non-developers contributors in the past, and we are ready to help as long as you are willing to learn. If you don't want to code at all, you can also help us preparing the documentation after someone else has the initial code ready, or you could also help with testing :-)

The idea is testing Salt and Salt-ssh clients, but NOT traditional clients, which are deprecated.

To consider that a distribution has basic support, we should cover at least (points 3-6 are to be tested for both salt minions and salt ssh minions):

1. Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
2. Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap scritp, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator)
3. Package management (install, remove, update...)
4. Patching
5. Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
6. Salt remote commands
7. Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement
8. Bonus point: sumaform enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/sumaform)
9. Bonus point: Documentation (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-docs)
10. Bonus point: testsuite enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/tree/master/testsuite)

If something is breaking: we can try to fix it, but the main idea is research how supported it is right now. Beyond that it's up to each project member how much to hack :-)

• If you don't have knowledge about some of the steps: ask the team
• If you still don't know what to do: switch to another distribution and keep testing.

This card is for EVERYONE, not just developers. Seriously! We had people from other teams helping that were not developers, and added support for Debian and new SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap versions :-)

Pending

Debian 13

The new version of the beloved Debian GNU/Linux OS

Seems to be a Debian 12 derivative, so adding it could be quite easy.

• [ ] Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
• W] Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap script, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator)
• [ ] Package management (install, remove, update...)
• [ ] Patching (if patch information is available, could require writing some code to parse it, but IIRC we have support for Ubuntu already). Probably not for Debian as IIRC we don't support patches yet.
• [ ] Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
• [ ] Salt remote commands
• [ ] Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement
• [ ] Bonus point: sumaform enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/sumaform)
• [ ] Bonus point: Documentation (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-docs)

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Multimachine on-prem test with opentofu, ansible and Robot Framework by apappas

Description

A long time ago I explored using the Robot Framework for testing. A big deficiency over our openQA setup is that bringing up and configuring the connection to a test machine is out of scope.

Nowadays we have a way¹ to deploy SUTs outside openqa, but we only use if for cloud tests in conjuction with openqa. Using knowledge gained from that project I am going to try to create a test scenario that replicates an openqa test but this time including the deployment and setup of the SUT.

Goals

Create a simple multimachine test scenario with the support server and SUT all created by the robot framework.

Resources

1. https://github.com/SUSE/qe-sap-deployment
2. terraform-libvirt-provider

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openQA tests needles elaboration using AI image recognition by mdati

Description

In the openQA test framework, to identify the status of a target SUT image, a screenshots of GUI or CLI-terminal images, the needles framework scans the many pictures in its repository, having associated a given set of tags (strings), selecting specific smaller parts of each available image. For the needles management actually we need to keep stored many screenshots, variants of GUI and CLI-terminal images, eachone accompanied by a dedicated set of data references (json).

A smarter framework, using image recognition based on AI or other image elaborations tools, nowadays widely available, could improve the matching process and hopefully reduce time and errors, during the images verification and detection process.

Goals

Main scope of this idea is to match a non-text status of a running openQA test, an image of a shell console or application-GUI screenshot, using less time and resources and with less errors in data preparation and use, than the actual openQA needles framework; that is:

• having a given SUT (system under test) GUI or CLI-terminal screenshot, with a local distribution of pixels or text commands related to a running test status,
• we want to identify a desired target, e.g. a screen image status or data/commands context,
  • based on AI/ML-pretrained archives containing object or other proper elaboration tools,
  • possibly able to identify also object not present in the archive, i.e. by means of AI/ML mechanisms.
• the matching result should be then adapted to continue working in the openQA test, likewise and in place of the same result that would have been produced by the original openQA needles framework.
• We expect an improvement of the matching-time(less time), reliability of the expected result(less error) and simplification of archive maintenance in adding/removing objects(smaller DB and less actions).

Hackweek step

POC:

• study the available tools
• prepare a plan for the process to build
• write and build a draft application
• prepare the data archive from a subset of needles
• initialize/pre-train the base archive
• select a screenshot from the subset, removing/changing some part
• run the POC application
• expect the image type is identified in a good %.

Resources

first step of this project is quite identification of useful resources for the scope; some possibilities are:

• SUSE AI and other ML tools (i.e. Tensorflow)
• Tools able to manage images
• RPA test tools (like i.e. Robot framework)
  
• other.

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