On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 07:53:55PM +0000, Scott Gorton wrote:
My build process creates a custom ISO image which is subsequently used to kickstart an Oracle X4-2 server using PXE. The ISO is a minimal install and contains a suite of packages and customization scripts to properly configure our box during first boot. The process works great for kickstarting baremetal machines as well as VMs created with virt-manager or vsphere.
I'd like to be able to use virt-builder to build virtual images automatically (i.e., take our .ISO and generate a qcow2 of a properly installed system). Unfortunately, virt-builder doesn't seem to like the format of my ISO image. The tool dies during the "Setting passwords" step because it's attempting to create a temp file in /etc and my ISO doesn't have an /etc directory at this point.
ISOs are not modifiable by the Linux kernel :-( So none of the tools like guestfish, virt-customize etc etc can work on them. It doesn't matter what options you use, the problem is in the Linux ISO driver (and possibly the ISO format -- I've no idea if it's plausible to write a driver than can modify ISO). For virt-p2v, we also need an ISO and a PXE image, and I would dearly like to use virt-builder to create it. I tried looking into ways to build one using virt-builder, but it's a much harder problem than it appears. In summary, if you find a way, please let us know :-( The virt-p2v scripts we have so far are: https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/p2v/virt-p2v-make-disk.... (documentation: http://libguestfs.org/virt-p2v-make-disk.1.html) https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/p2v/virt-p2v-make-kicks... (documentation: http://libguestfs.org/virt-p2v-make-kickstart.1.html) Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-builder quickly builds VMs from scratch http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html