Setting up a CentOS Home Virtualization Server

Friday May 1st, 2020
Hey! I got a SATA HDD (instead of an SCSI HDD which the T5500 doesn’t have the wires to support, lol)
1st things first. Install the HDD. This took over an hour! I put it in one bay. Turned on the machine and saw that it wasn’t being recognized. Hmmm
I took it out and tried to put it in another bay, but it wouldn’t fit there with the wiring. Bummer.
I took the HDD out and replaced it in the first bay that I tried. The BIOS still didn’t read the HDD and so I poked around in the BIOS settings.
An administrator password! The seller/previous user should have cleared that! Aghh I am gonna have to get that from the eBay seller! And so much dust on top of that!
What a bother, then I realize, they probably have no idea where to get that info, and it would be such a wild goose chase; Instead, I should just clear the password from the BIOS.
Thanks for the easy instructions Dell!
T5500 BIOS password reset instructions + etc

So now I begin to start step one of My following a redditor’s post journey of How do I become a Linux SysAdmin.
Google search “kvm hypervisor centos”
I love Redditors! https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/79j0sv/centos_as_kvm_hypervisor/
Another blogger https://www.marksei.com/howto-virtualization-kvm-centos-7/
The official download, I am going CentOS 7 https://wiki.centos.org/Download
Be careful here, older versions are not supported according to the main page.
The install is 4.5G! I’ll have to wait a few minutes to download and then to write it to a flash drive

I plugged the CentOS 7 install drive in, got to the installation menu….and it doesn’t see the HDD.
Google search “centos install not seeing hard drive”
https://forums.centos.org/viewtopic.php?t=49069&p=233372

Looks like there is an issue with the RAID setup, potentially from settings I may have changed in the BIOS after resetting the password.
Turned off TPM
https://forums.centos.org/viewtopic.php?t=70910

There is something on the HDD preventing the installer from recognizing it.
I will install using the live version so that I can load the OS and reconfigure the HDD. Likely there is something on it, since I bought it used. Could be that an unused filesystem is on there and the BIOS recognizes the drive, but the OS is not able to. :-/ Will have to wait a while longer since I thought I could save time downloading a flashing a smaller install.

Downloaded the everything iso, flashed it, but it was “everything” as in all the different standard software package add-ons, not the same as a live disk.
Refresh the live disk. Tinker around open up the GUI. See the same message when I install from live.
Then I open the terminal and tinker. Finally I Google “how to see the partition in linux” like a noob
I see # lsblk and realize that is the one! I have used that one before. I see it in the terminal! There are partitions on this disk!
So how to delete them.. I look to see if parted or parted is on this live disk. NO, but Gnome disks is there.
Ok, and there, I see the HDD, delete the partitions and now I can finally see the HDD to install the OS!!!!!

OS installed. Root password and admin user created. I checked the Disk and the memory to confirm that I can see 1Tb of disk and 32G of RAM.
Now I just need to make sure that I can ssh into this box and I can move it to a more suitable place in my room.
First google result
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/how-to-enable-ssh-centos-7

This looks promising!

After more than two weeks, I finally ended up posting this. Clearly still not an old hand, but this project has me feeling that IU can figure stuff out. Look up trouble with things that I already know and make it work.