leseb / inktank-training-vms

Scripts to create OVF/OVA for training VMs.

Ceph training vms

Welcome. For documentation on how to actually use the virtual machines, please refer to your training material. This file is mostly concerned with creating and updating the images.

How to build & publish images

To build the images, run:

./run

and hope for the best. The full toolchain required is not well documented, at this point.

To upload, you need to have a properly-configured botosh with a service named train configured, pointing to DreamObjects bucket inktank-training-vms, see http://objects.dreamhost.com/inktank-training-vms/index.html . To perform the upload, run:

./upload

There is no versioning on the images themselves, currently. Don't make a mess.

Details about the virtualization

File formats

OVF is a standard interchange format for virtual machines, and collections of virtual machines.

OVA is essentially a tarball of the OVF and the disk images. It is meant to simplify downloading the images, but does not seem to be as widely supported.

The list of VMDK image subtypes was hard to find, so archiving here: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/visdk41pubs/ApiReference/vim.OvfManager.CreateImportSpecParams.DiskProvisioningType.html

Hypervisor support

The images have been testd on VirtualBox on Linux. They are expected to work on all VirtualBox platforms.

VMWare's commercial offerings are expected to import the OVA/OVF without problems. With VMWare Player, there are conflicting reports, see http://superuser.com/questions/81129/running-ovf-on-vmware-player for more. Also see http://askubuntu.com/questions/153486/how-do-i-boot-ubuntu-cloud-images-in-vmware .

You should be able to get the disk images to work with KVM/QEmu or libvirt, but we are not aware of any OVF support, so you'll need to define the virtual machines manually.

Workarounds

• VirtualBox does not support OVF Environments, so we can't configure cloud-init that way -> manually provide a disk image to configure the vm
• don't know what ovf:format to use for an ISO image -> use VFAT for cloud-init configuration image
• VirtualBox does not seem to support CoW parent images, when importing an OVF -> refer to the same File from multiple Disks
• referring to the same File from multiple Disks seems to break VirtualBox's OVA support -> for VirtualBox, download all the other files, except for the *.ova [1]
• VirtualBox does not seem to support blank disks, when importing an OVF -> need to include dummy VMDKs, even for empty disks
• VMDK support in QEmu/VirtualBox is quite buggy, yet it seems to be the one disk image format supported by all platforms -> jump through hoops with qemu-img and vboxmanage clonehd, to get the VMDKs into streamOptimized format. [2]
• VirtualBox has trouble verifying the manifests, this may be related to the CoW workarounds -> hope your downloads work right

[1]	https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10689

[2]	https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qemu-kvm/+bug/1006655