I’m investigating the creation of VM images for different virtualisation solutions.
Among the target platforms is a destop as a service platform based on an OpenStack public cloud.
We’ve been working with bootstrap-vz for creating VMs for Vagrant+VirtualBox so I wanted to test its use for OpenStack.
There are already pre-made images available, including official Debian ones, but I like to be able to re-create things instead of depending on some external magic (which also means to be able to optimize, customize and avoid potential MitM, of course).
It appears that bootstrap-vz can be used with cloud-init provided that some bits of config are specified.
In particular the cloud_init plugin of bootstrap-vz requires a metadata_source set to “NoCloud, ConfigDrive, OpenStack, Ec2“. Note we explicitely spell it ‘OpenStack‘ and not ‘Openstack‘ as was mistakenly done in the default Debian cloud images (see https://bugs.debian.org/854482).
The following snippet of manifest provides the necessary bits :
---
name: debian-{system.release}-{system.architecture}-{%Y}{%m}{%d}
provider:
name: kvm
virtio_modules:
- virtio_pci
- virtio_blk
bootstrapper:
workspace: /target
# create or reuse a tarball of packages
tarball: true
system:
release: jessie
architecture: amd64
bootloader: grub
charmap: UTF-8
locale: en_US
timezone: UTC
volume:
backing: raw
partitions:
#type: gpt
type: msdos
root:
filesystem: ext4
size: 4GiB
swap:
size: 512MiB
packages:
# change if another mirror is closer
mirror: http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/
plugins:
root_password:
password: whatever
cloud_init:
username: debian
# Note we explicitely spell it 'OpenStack' and not 'Openstack' as done in the default Debian cloud images (see https://bugs.debian.org/854482)
metadata_sources: NoCloud, ConfigDrive, OpenStack, Ec2
# admin_user:
# username: Administrator
# password: Whatever
minimize_size:
# reduce the size by around 250 Mb
zerofree: true
I’ve tested this with the bootstrap-vz version in stretch/testing (0.9.10+20170110git-1) for creating jessie/stable image, which were booted on the OVH OpenStack public cloud. YMMV.
Hope this helps