Preparing the client machine

As we are preparing the Chef set-up in a sandbox environment, we also need to prepare the client environments for the sandbox. While we are not setting up live environments with multiple nodes as agents with multiple machines, we need to set up virtual environments for client installation.

The sandbox environment is a single machine; the client VM can be another VMware image set up in the host machine (windows) or virtual machines on the guest VM (Linux). We have used an RHEL v7 based machine as the host to install the client VM.

Typically, a VM manager is part of the host system. If we didn’t select the virtualisation packages while installing the server, we need to install virt-manager manually. To install the package, we can either use the RHELv7 ISO image, or set up the Yum repository by mounting the ISO file or by downloading it from the Red Hat website directly. This installation can be done by running the following command: client VM. Please follow the same steps we did to install the guest OS to prepare this client VM. Also note that we are taking the same guest OS resource—Chef Server and related services are running in the guest OS and, hence, use less resources for the client VM to enable enough resources to be available for the guest OS. The installation runs as shown in Figure 3.

Once the installation is over, edit /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf and uncomment the user and group lines. This will enable the root user and root group permissions for virt-manager. If we do not do this, we may face permission issues while accessing the Linux image file when we try to run the client VM. Now start the virtual manager service using the following command: