Image Characteristics

The usual suspects are present:

• minimal package install
• serial console support
• timezone is Etc/UTC
• hostname set to instance name
• a single partition with root filesystem, no swap
• grow root filesystem to device size
• enable EPEL (install epel-release)
• enable could-init repo to get 0.7.1

A few things are still lacking:

• selinux is in permissive mode, make enforcing
• strengthen default firewall

Build

Tools like Oz are a good idea in theory but in practice seem to be quite picky about the environment they will correctly run on. I'm looking at you libguestfs. Other tools like the venerable appliance-creator get hung up on needing the same version of things in the host as in the chroot.

Good ole virt-install happily runs on damn near everything. This build has been tested on CentOS 6.4 and Ubuntu 12.10. TODO(dtroyer): don't run this all as root

Let's get started.

• Install virt-install and all its prerequisites

  • on Ubuntu:

    sudo apt-get install virtinst
    

  • on CentOS:

    sudo yum install libvirt python-virtinst qemu-kvm
    sudo /etc/init.d/libvirtd start
    

• Get a CentOS 6 kickstart file with minimal stuff and the extras that we need. Included in %post is a bit to resize the root filesystem to the size of the actual device provided to the VM.

• Create base image with virt-install:

  sudo virt-install \
      --name centos-6-x86_64 \
      --ram 1024 \
      --cpu host \
      --vcpus 1 \
      --nographics \
      --os-type=linux \
      --os-variant=rhel6 \
      --location=http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/6/os/x86_64 \
      --initrd-inject=centos-6-x86_64.ks \
      --extra-args="ks=file:/centos-6-x86_64.ks text console=tty0 utf8 console=ttyS0,115200" \
      --disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/centos-6-x86_64.img,size=2,bus=virtio \
      --force \
      --noreboot
  

• Point to the bridge with external connectivity if it is not eth0:

  --network=bridge=br0
  

• If libguestfs is functional on your build platform:

  sudo yum install -y libguestfs-tools
  sudo virt-sysprep --no-selinux-relabel -a /var/lib/libvirt/images/centos-6-x86_64.img
  sudo virt-sparsify --convert qcow2 --compress /var/lib/libvirt/images/centos-6-x86_64.img centos-6-x86_64.qcow2
  

• Kick it into the cloud image repository:

  glance image-create --name "CentOS 6 x86_64" \
      --disk-format qcow2 --container-format bare \
      --is-public false --file centos-6-x86_64.qcow2