On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 11:54 AM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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 ). A couple of notes on virt-builder: * When I tried it, all of the images booted on Xen out-of-the-box except Fedora 19 and 20; I reported this to the list and the developers were very responsive, so now everything works. (The exception might be RHEL7-rc, but I think should be gone now.) * However, libguestfs has a massive dependency tree in RHEL7 for some reason; KB said that a "yum install libguestfs" wanted to install 178 additional RPMs. A minimal C6 install is only 143 RPMs, so this more than doubles it. That makes this a bit less desirable as the primary method of getting a system up and running quickly. So it looks like we might want to recommend three potential paths we could recommend people to explore: 1) For basic CentOS VMs, use a CentOS-provided cloud image, with our custom metadata tweaking script. 2) For more versatile image set-up and manipulation (including other operating systems), use virt-builder. 3) If you're thinking about using libvirt anyway, use virt-install and install from installation media. Does that sound reasonable? #1 still has some issues we need to work out -- particularly with sorting out the metadata. I'll start a separate thread to talk about that. -George _______________________________________________ CentOS-virt mailing list CentOS-virt@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt
