Archipel – how to install on CentOS6

About Archipel

Archipel is a solution to manage and supervise virtual machines. You can see it as some kind of free VMWare Infrastructure Client: it is a central solution to manage even hundreds of Virtual Machines installed on many different Hypervisors. Besides basic virtualization commands there are and many other things like live migration, VMCasts, packages, etc.
It is based on XMPP, so the web based GUI itself and every hypervisor are actually registered users on the XMPP server – you can even chat with the hypervisors giving commands to them – for example reboot a virtual machine.
You can even import in Archipel virtual machines previously defined on an hypervisor!
Archipel supports the creation of users and roles: so only authorized users could have console access to Virtual Machines.
Again, you will be aware of the health of your hypervisors in real-time: Memory usage, CPU load, CPU time, free disk space, load average or total amount swapped memory…

here is a little screenshot of an Archipel based system:

Our goal

In this post we’ll see how to install and Archipel infrastructure (XMPP Server, Agent, Client). Our example consists of 2 hosts: mcu01 is the XMPP server and Archipel Client, and mch01 that is the Hypervisor (libvirt, Qemu-KVM, Archipel Agent). Our subnet is 192.1689.90.0, mcu01.carcano.local has IP address 192.168.90.10 and mch01.carcano.local has IP address 192.168.90.11.

Please notice that the actual comunications to the XMPP server are not between the host with the Archipel Client and the XMPP Server itself, rather then the actual PC running a web browser connected to the Archipel Client – this means that if you want to use it from Internet you have to publish the XMPP Server – for example with a 1-to-1 NAT or a port forwarding.

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