HackMD
Observability Study Group Lab - Week 01
Goals:
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Get a hypervisor running on your laptop
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Install the OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Server operating system
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During the study group, you will use observability technologies to instrument an application running on your laptop.
This first week, you are going to provision the server which will run our sample application and the observability software to instrument it. Instead of a physical server or one in the cloud, we will be creating a virtual machine running on our laptop.
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Step 1 - Install Hypervisor
If you are using a Mac, especially if that Mac uses "Apple Silicon" as it's processor, you will use "UTM" as your hypervisor and emulate an x86_64 CPU.
Emulation is the act of pretending to be something you aren't, in order to maintain compatibility with software. If the operating system wants to use an x86_64 CPU, the hypervisor can translate all the software interactions with that CPU into those appropriate for the physical CPU in the computer. It takes a little longer, but CPUs today are so fast that for many use cases, such as this one, the issue is moot.
If you are using a Windows laptop, you should use Oracle's VirtualBox hypervisor.
The installation instructions here are for a Mac, but an experienced Windows user should have no problem translating the process for MacOS/UTM to Windows/VirtualBox.
First, download the hypervisor installation package from the URL above.
Next, open the ".dmg" file (double-click) and then drag the UTM.app icon into the Applications folder icon.
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Step 2 - Install Operating System
Now we need to get the installation software for our operating system (OpenSUSE). We will do this by downloading a single-file disc image of an installation DVD and "mount" it in the virtual DVD-ROM drive of our virtual machine.
https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/
Once the OpenSUSE Tumbleweed download page is open, click "Download" and then choose the Offline Image for Intel or AMD 64-bit desktops, laptops and servers (x86_64).
Open the UTM application (double-click the icon in your Applications folder).
Once running, click on "Create a New Virtual Machine" and choose Emulate to run other CPU architectures. Choose "Linux" as your operating system and then click "Browse…" and select the .ISO image of the OpenSUSE offine media you previously downloaded.
Click "Continue" and then choose the "x86_64" architecture and a Standard PC as your system. The default "q35" system is fine.
Choose 2GB of Memory and 1 CPU core, then click "Continue".
An 8GB storage drive size should be sufficient. Set the size to 8GB and click "Continue".
There is no need to set up a shared directory, so just click "Continue" at this step.
On the Summary step, change the name of the VM from "Linux" to "App Server" and click "Save".
You now have a virtual machine with an operating system installation disc mounted; power it on by clicking the round "play" button in the UTM user interface.
This will open another window, which is the local screen/monitor/console of the virtual machine. The OpenSUSE Tumbleweed installation application should have automatically started; choose the "Installation" option from the opening menu.
(NOTE: your mouse may not work inside the VM window if no mouse is supported at the time; use your keyboard to navigate)
Eventually, the graphical installer application will run. Choose your preferred locale settings and click "Next" to accept the license agreement.
When asked whether to activate online repositories, choose "Yes". You can leave the default selections for repositories as they are and click "Next" to continue.
At the System Role screen, choose "Server" and click "Next".
Click "Next" to accept the suggested partitioning of the 8GB of storage you allocated to this virtual machine.
For time zone, I suggest Region "Etc" and Time Zone "UTC" for a server, but you can select your local time zone if you like; when this becomes a consideration, we can translate back from your local time zone to UTC.
Create a new user account for yourself; remember your password, or set it to 'password', and use ths password for the system administrator account (root).
If you choose an insecure password, that is OK; there is nothing to secure on this server. If you are asked if you really want to use this password, select "Yes".
At the Installation Settings screen, click "Install" and then confirm the installation by clicking "Install" in the pop-up window.
The installation process may take some time; go make tea and during that zen sipping time, realize that this delay is precisely why automation and orchestration of software running in containers is a thing.
Once the installation is complete, the virtual machine will reboot. When it does, it will re-launch the installer software because the DVD is still in the optical drive. Your operating system has not run yet, so it is safe to simply power off the virtual machine using the power icon in the upper left of the window.
Click the power icon in the title bar and then click "OK" as confirmation. It is safe to shut down this VM in this condition.
In the main UTM window, click on the App Server "penguin" icon, then, click on the "CD/DVD" drop-down control which appears at the lower right of the screen. Select "Clear" to remove the virtual DVD from the virtual drive.
Then, click the round play action button to start the VM.
Once the operating system has started, login to the VM as both your username and as 'root' using the password. If you can, you have realized success and completed this week's lab.
