July 3, 2025
Automated KVM VM Provisioning with Ansible and OSBuild on RHEL9
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Introduction
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When I started looking into automating my homelab VM provisioning, I was surprised by the lack of examples combining Ansible with OSBuild for KVM environments. Not many tutorials focus on KVM, so I wanted something that used Red Hat’s tooling - as I run a RHEL homelab.
I used to provision my homelab virtual machines by hand and eventually I got tired of doing it since I like to tinker around a lot and constantly add new VMs. So, I decided to automate the process using the combination of Ansible and OSBuild.
June 3, 2025
Enable EPEL Repository on RHEL 9
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The EPEL repository provides packages that are not included in the standard RHEL repositories, such as htop and vim for example.
Prerequisites
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Before installing EPEL, you need to enable the CodeReady Builder repository, which provides dependencies for many EPEL packages.
Installation Steps
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Enable codeready builder repository
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subscription-manager repos --enable codeready-builder-for-rhel-9-$(arch)-rpms
Install epel-release
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dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm
Verification
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After installation, you can verify that EPEL is enabled by listing available repositories:
November 4, 2024
Extending LVM Partitions
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This guide walks you through extending LVM partitions when you’ve added new disk space to your system.
LVM Structure
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LVM operates with three main components:
- Physical Volumes (PV): The actual disk partitions
- Volume Groups (VG): Collections of physical volumes
- Logical Volumes (LV): The volumes you mount and use
Common Scenario
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You’ve added disk space to a virtual machine and need to extend the root filesystem. This is a common requirement in virtualized environments where storage needs grow over time.