[CentOS-virt] Preferred method of provisioning VM images

Karanbir Singh mail-lists at karan.org
Mon Jun 16 10:54:27 UTC 2014


On 06/10/2014 05:21 PM, Lars Kurth wrote:
> == #4 Cloud Image from Cloud Image SIG ==
> We could rely on pre-built cloud images from the Cloud Images SIG. 
> People could just download the cloud image once it's done and customize 
> it, rather than installing / building their own.
> 
> Advantages: seems easy
> 
> Disadvantages: coordination with Cloud Images SIG. May not be flexible 
> enough

We ship a test/devel grade CentOS-6-x86_64-pv image ( well, its a qcow2
image, should work for pvhvm as well, the fstab is label driven ).[1]

The biggest problem in doing pre-baked images is the instance metadata.
We need to find an easy way to get network settings into the instance
and the root password ( or key ), and finally - in some cases, console
redirection/setup, but i dont think the console is a deal breaker or a
big deal. The network and access credentials however are.

In a typical cloud environ this info would come from the cloud
controller's metadata service; on a typical virtualised setup though
this becomes an issue ( and isnt really Xen specific ).

We could work around this by making some assumptions, we could 'own'
dnsmasq and ensure that either libvirt is running and doing dhcp,
otherwise we do the dhcp with some sane defaults, or we setup a script
to 'instantiate image', which asks how the user wants to setup the
instance ( pvhvm, hvm, pv ), the root password or key to use, and the
network settings ( and if this is run on the dom0, we could even ask
what bridge or device to connect with as well as the settings ).[2]

Ofcourse, having these images pushed from here mean that clouds or
virtualised environs that have metadata services are able to just-use
the image as is, not needing any more tooling etc. And we can easily
push monthly image updates and when things like heartbleed come around,
there is a single place we need to update.

- KB
[1]: http://cloud.centos.org/centos/6/devel/

[2] might need to pull in all of libguestfs to make the changes, which
in turn has its own challenges if run inside a virtualised environ.

-- 
Karanbir Singh
+44-207-0999389 | http://www.karan.org/ | twitter.com/kbsingh
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