Overview

We recommend to use VMs for NMS Prime. This will make life easier in the future, because:

Pros while using VMs:

• full backup possibility (snapshots)
• easy updates and backwards compatibility
• hardware independence
• more flexible while moving towards HA-architecture (High Availability) and Clustering

We use qemu KVM architecture with the virt-manager GUI.

Pros while using KVM:

• completely free / open source
• native linux kernel support
• large community
• fast, stable and worldwide tested

Recommended file format is *.qcow2. This file format will only allocate as much space as required on the real host.

Setting up the real host

We also use CentOS 7 on the real machines. This makes life easier, because we only need to know CentOS config style. Of cause you could use other Linux distribution on the real host.

Required packages:

yum install qemu-kvm qemu-img libvirt libvirt-python libvirt-client virt-install virt-viewer bridge-utils

Download CentOS 7

https://www.centos.org/download/

http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1708.iso

Create the NMS Prime VM

Install CentOS 7

This is quit basic CentOS 7 install. Nothing spectacular . No magic happens

Update your system

yum update -y

Networking

We use bridge networking API. Things you need to do is:

1. real host: all IPs must run on the bridge interface and not on the real network
2. real host: assign the bridge device to your real network interface
3. VM: assign the VM to your new bridge device

This is perfectly explained here: https://www.linuxtechi.com/install-kvm-hypervisor-on-centos-7-and-rhel-7/