[Neurodebian-devel] Tools for creating VM images

Yury V. Zaytsev yury at shurup.com
Fri Aug 23 09:13:48 UTC 2013


On Fri, 2013-08-23 at 11:02 +0200, Emmanuel Kasper wrote:

> Yes the Debian installer can load its preseed file from a floppy or usb
> stick,  but you would still need to remaster the iso to add your
> modified isolinux.cfg, which would then look for your floppy preseed.

RHEL also doesn't search for kickstarts automatically, but you can tell
it to do so via the kernel boot parameter (ks).

Using libvirt you can do this with --extra-args, using VirtualBox you
have to send keystrokes to the console, have a look a NeuroDebian
scripts to see how they implemented this.

> At some point I tried  provisioning with virtinstall, and then
> converting the img to OVA format. A virtinstall qemu image works on
> VirtualBox but a kvm crashes on startup.

Okay, but then what's wrong with qemu? Is it so unacceptably slow?

Regarding the crashing KVM image, I would speculate that this is because
it rebuilt the initrd so that it's not generic anymore. Not sure whether
you can suppress this on Debian...

> If you look for more generic solutions you could also have a look at
> https://wiki.debian.org/VMBuilder ( maintained up to Debian6, not
> working on recent debian versions ) and ubuntu vm-builder ( for ubuntu
> guests)

Hmmm, sounds interesting.

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev





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