When using packer to create a virtual box centos 7 VM does packer take care of installing the guest additions?
I have looked at several examples and one of them does the guest additions mounting and installing in the packer json file, is this necessary?
When I run the build I can see that packer takes care of downloading the guest additions but I am unsure if it installs them.
It doesn't install them. That you need to take care of yourself. It will download them to the host and upload it to the guest or attach it as CD.
Related
If you are developing Python web services for local network (servers is totally offline from the web) and the only way to add files to the server is through Flash drivers so using pip for Python packages or npm for node packages is such a headache and gets in a lot of dependencies issues and build issues .. so what is the proper way of dealing with such environment so development and deployment would be easier?
there are 2 approaches which you can take:
download all your dependencies locally and ship them to the remote server. this includes all the pip and npm packages. pay attention to the python\nodejs\operating system versions and architecture.
use docker to create an image, which packs everything. then ship the image to the remote server and finally spin-up a container based on that image.
You can use Pypicache to run your own pip servers and let it to cache your dependencies wherever you have an internet connection (where you are developing the application).
Then you can copy the whole pypicache folder on your flash drive and run the server wherever you want and use the cached packages inside it. the good point is in some environments that you can get a network connection for a limited time, having a pypicache is useful because it can download whatever all of the dependencies that your python applications need, and each instance would download and install the dependencies from the offline pip server by providing a simple switch in the command line. Here is an example:
pip install -i http://localhost:8080/simple somepackage
More Information - pypicache
How can I create a virtual machine (Centos-8) using a gitlab-ci.yml file?
No software needed to build the VM should be installed on the Gitlab runner. Binary software should also not be checked into git.
I can create docker images - for example for the use of Packer - in a prebuild step. This image can be cached in Artifactory.
But how should I handle that for the Centos image?
During the installation using Packer, there`s a reboot required...
I have been looking out for ways to setup an automation environment and I found this application named Vagrant. I read the docs on the site, however I wanted to know from the experts out there if Vagrant with Oracle VirtualBox would suffice my needs.
I need to have a script that will call Vagrant to initialize a VM [The VM-Image is always the same - Windows Server 2008 R2]
I need to copy some of my project related files from a shared location onto the VM
Call a Batch file that will take care of test runs for me inside the VM
Once my test run is complete, This VM needs to be self destroyed/destructed.
Also, I would like to know if the Image be a custom .ISO file?
Sounds like Vagrant and VirtualBox will work for that scenario. Also, you might find that running commands in the VM using WinRM or SSH may be the easiest way to launch tests.
If you haven't already seen it, the blog post about Windows support in Vagrant 1.6 is informative: https://www.vagrantup.com/blog/feature-preview-vagrant-1-6-windows.html
Creating a VirtualBox/Vagrant base VM from an .iso should work, and you can then do all of your work using the VM from that point onward.
To get started, you might try these steps:
Create a VirtualBox VM from your Windows .iso, using the VirtualBox GUI or cmdline tools.
Once you have the VM in the state you want it, shut it down and package it as a vagrant box - for example, on a Mac that step looks like (where Win7x64 is the dir containing the VirtualBox VM):
cd ~/VirtualBox\ VMs
vagrant package --base Win7x64 --output win7x64_base.box
Once that finishes, tell vagrant about the new base box:
vagrant box add win7x64_base /path/to/win7_base.box
Then you can vagrant init/vagrant up the VM:
mkdir win7 && cd win7
vagrant init win7x64
vagrant up
To enable SSH access, I installed Cygwin in the VM and configured sshd. So, after launching you can SSH in by running vagrant ssh
Note that if there's no Windows user in the VM named 'vagrant', you can specify the SSH username to use with vagrant ssh by placing this in your Vagrantfile:
config.ssh.username = 'user1'
As mentioned above, WinRM is also an option for remotely running commands.
And Vagrant apparently has some convenience features to make it easy to RDP into the VM, but I haven't looked at that.
Recently I've been dabbling with vagrant and docker. These are quite interesting tools, but I haven't been able to convince myself that it's the way to go quite yet on my OS X machine. Being an old Unix hat, I have to say that I like having a consolidated and sandboxed environment for development purposes.
I've seen a lot of chatter and a number of friends have been using vagrant with just stock vim for editing. I'm not really a fan of that approach and would probably prefer to use the vm provider's sharing mechanism OR, more likely, NFS.
Personally I'd like to be able to edit directly in TextMate, SublimeText, Emacs (on OS X), or even perhaps use RubyMine and its various IDE features, etc.
Is there any way to really get the workflow down so that such an environment will be essentially like working on a local environment without having to pull a lot of additional background strings to make things work out?
I suppose a few well placed scripts could go a long way, but I've not found any solid answers on really making this a seamless environment.
What actually worked for me was to use boot2docker which makes it easy to install a lightweight virtual machine (with VirtualBox) that will host your docker deamon and images. The only thing you need in order to run docker commands is to run $(boot2docker shellinit) when you open a new Terminal.
If you need to also have your files on an OS X folder and share them with a running docker image, you need some additional setup, but once you do it, you won't have to do it again.
Have a look here for a nice walkthrough on how to do it. The steps in short are:
Get a special boot2docker image that allows you to use shared folders for VirtualBox
Configure VirtualBox to share a folder:
VBoxManage sharedfolder add boot2docker-vm -name home -hostpath /Users
This will share your /Users folder with the boot2docker image that hosts docker.
From you Mac share the folder you need with a folder in a docker image like:
docker run -it -v /Users/me/dev/my-project:/root/src:rw ubuntu /bin/bash
One small annoyance that I haven't found how to overcome is that you do not longer access your software through localhost because it actually runs on boot2docker instance. You have to run boot2docker ip and access that ip.
Hope that helps!
Is is possible to automate the installation of an OS using VMware or any other virtualization product?
One of our products consists of a customized version of CentOS that installs the OS and our application on a server. It's much like any CentOS/RHEL installation where you choose a mode that corresponds to different kickstart options, and then you choose your keyboard type. The rest of the installation is automatic.
What I'd like to have is an automated system that will create a new guest VM, boot it with the ISO image of our product, start the installation (including choosing the keyboard), wait for the reboot, and then launch a set of automated tests.
I know that there are plenty of ways to automate the creation of new VM guests from existing templates/images, and I know you can use the VIX API to interact with virtual machines, but the VIX API seems to require that VMware tools is already running (which won't be the case when you're booting from the CentOS install disk).
This answer (Automating VMWare or VirtualPC) indicates that you can script VMware to boot from an ISO that does an unattended installation, but I would really like to test the same process that our customers will be using.
Another option might be to use Xen's fully-virtualized mode and see if scripting it over the serial port will work.
TIA,
Jason
I have a very very similar question, it is on superuser:
https://superuser.com/questions/36047/moving-vmware-os-image-as-primary-os-on-a-system
You can also use VirtualBox instead of VMWare. The VirtualBox SDK allows you to directly control the keyboard, the mouse the serial port and the parallel port of the guest without the virtualbox guest tools installed.
Unfortunately it doesn't offer a text console interface but the serial port can be connected to a local pipe file and that can probably be worked with just as well.
This may not be exactly what you need:
I have done something similar with a Ubuntu-based install. We used preseeding (Debian's form of kickstart), to answer all the questions during the install - providing the preseed file and the installer via tftp.
In addition to the official Ubuntu mirror we added the apt-server with our own packages in the preseed file. We put a .deb version of vmware-tools on the apt-server and added it to the packages to be installed.
The .deb of vmware tools just contained the .tar.gz and a postinstall script that would extract it to /tmp and run the vmware install script (which has a switch to be run unnattended, so it does not ask any questions).
So after the reboot vmware-tools were up and running and we could use vix to script the rest (which was not very reliable).
If you should encounter problems with running vmware-config.pl during boot, you could make a custom package that just extracts the tools and an init script that installs them on first boot, disables itself and reboots.
Maybe you can use this strategy (replacing apt by yum, preseed by kickstart and tftp by a remastered iso). If you really need to test that your users choose a keyboard in the installer (which is not very different from kickstart) this would obviously not work for you..