About the Guest Agent

The RHEL 7.x virtual machine guest agent in RHV 4.x provides  drivers, additional data, and functionality once installed on a RHEL virtual machine.

The guest agent includes:

• virtio-net paravirtualized network driver
• virtio-scsi paravirtualized HDD driver
• virtio-balloon driver which improves memory overcommit (currently not used by RHV)
• rhevm-guest-agent common which allows RHV to retrieve guest internal information such as IP addresses and allows RHV to gracefully reboot the guest

You can view the entire list here.

When spawning a virtual machine in RHV without the guest agent, a warning will appear as an exclamation mark in RHV.

Register with Satellite

You can skip this step if your guest is already registered

In order to install the guest agent, I must first register the virtual machine with my local satellite. If not using a local satellite server, you can register with RHN.

First we need to grab the katello rpm from satellite – an insecure satellite server in this case as we are using a self-signed cert.

# curl -Ok https://satellite.lab.localdomain/pub/katello-ca-consumer-latest.noarch.rpm

Then install the rpm.

# rpm -ivh katello-ca-consumer-latest.noarch.rpm

Now register with Satellite. In the example below, we are using a custom activation key and organization.

# subscription-manager register –activationkey=”auburn-lab-ak” –org=”lab”

Installing the Guest Agent

You will need to ensure that the RHEL 7 RH Common repo is enabled. If the repo is not available to the guest, you will need to enable.

# yum repolist | grep common
!rhel-7-server-rh-common-rpms/7Server/x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 234

If the proper repo is enabled, then run the following command.

Once installed, the orange exclamation point will disappear.

Start and Enable the Guest Agent Service

# systemctl enable ovirt-guest-agent.service
# systemctl start ovirt-guest-agent.service