[CentOS-devel] Cloud and VM Images

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2014 at 05:20:18PM +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> On 06/21/2014 09:45 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >> http://buildlogs.centos.org/centos/7/cloud/
> > 
> > Is that built using the centos.sh script?
> > 
> 
> slightly modified one - i will merge in the kickstarts used for the
> CentOS AMI's and the stuff we have in the cloud-instance-sig kickstarts
> into one.
> 
> xz is interesting, can certainly do one of those as well, but we want to
> have a qcow2 as well so it can be directly consumed as a url inside
> opennebula, openstack, eucalyptus and fog ( and its friends )

Do these make a copy?  In qemu there is support for directly using
http as a block device .. unfortunately it doesn't work well.  Any
delay of over 60 seconds in the HTTP request causes I/O errors in the
guest.

> also, how and what exactly do we need to sign for virt-builder and where
> do i need to submit that ?

Create an index file like this example:

  http://libguestfs.org/download/builder/index

The exact specification is here:

  http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html#creating-and-signing-the-index-file

and there is a validation tool in Fedora 20+:

  $ virt-index-validate ./index
  ./index validated OK

It would be good to call the guests "centos-*", eg. centos-7.0 etc.
If you can have the index cover your existing CentOS 6.x cloud images,
then I can delete the ones we are hosting.  I'm not interested in
hosting CentOS images long term if I can help it.

Sign the index file using:

  gpg --clearsign --armor index

which creates 'index.asc'.

Upload index.asc to your site, and keep it up to date as new cloud
images are created.

In the meantime, send your GPG public key, and the URL of the
index.asc file (ideally a permanent URL) to: mailto:libguestfs at redhat.com

I will create a repo file which will be bundled with virt-builder
upstream.  The repo file will look something like this:

--------------- /etc/virt-builder/repos.d/centos.conf ---
[centos]
uri=http://centos.org/path/to/index.asc
gpgkey=file:///etc/virt-builder/repos.d/centos.gpg
---------------------------------------------------------

The result will be that anyone on any distro can create CentOS cloud
images just by doing:

  $ virt-builder centos-7.0

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests.
http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v