I would like to script a build of a virtual machine from a base image, with a number of files and folders being copied across to the target machine, and some software also installed on it. Is this possible? Which technology is best suited to this - VMWare, Virtual PC/Server or Virtual Box? The solution has to run on WS2003 or WS2008, so the new Windows Virtual PC is not an option for me.
Thanks, MagicAndi.
I've used VMWare for this in the past, particularly the free VMWare Server product. Create a VM and install the OS as usual, then use sysprep to package the machine and feed it an unattend file. After sysprep shuts the machine down, save it off as your base image.
When you want to create a new image, make a copy of your base image, then use the vmware-mount tool to mount the newly copied image as a drive letter. Open up the unatend file and change out the machine name, etc, and added any additional commands you want to run after the machine is powered on. Then vmware-mount /d and power on the virtual machine.
Script all this together and you've got a one-click machine generator.
I'm a fan of VWmare server -- it's free, and the vmx file format is easily understood.
The solution I have came up is to bake all the changes I need to make to the virtual machine into a custom MSI, built up using the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset. To install third-party software on the virtual machine, I can either track the changes to the OS by each application installer (using Process Monitor from SysInternal Software) and replicate them into my own custom MSI, or I can use a script (like this AutoIt script) to install the software from a shared directory. I also am looking into using White and PowerShell for scripting.
It look like it may be possible to automate the creation of virtual images using MS Virtual Server 2005. The following articles detail the use of PowerShell scripts to automate the creation of virtual images:
Configuration Testing With Virtual Server, Part 1
Configuration Testing With Virtual Server, Part 2
From part 2, in the section Configuration Tests on a Virtual Machine, it seems possible to transfer files and schedule scripts to run. Using these articles as a basis, it should be possible to automate the building of a MS virtual image in the same way as lordbrain described for a VMware image.
Related
I've got a question about VMs and installing programs.
I've got a vsphere 6.0 running on my server and I try to automatically create new VMs (or use clean installed snapshots) an then automatically install software on these VMs.
e.g.:
A user wishes to create a new Windows 7 with xampp installed and firefox + thunderbird + eclipse. The VM will be created and during the first start these programs will be installed.
Is this possible or are there any tools that can help?
Or can I use the VMware API to realize this?
Thank you very much.
There is no way that Vsphere can do these installations that I know of. In fact I don't know of a way to install an application to a running windows box remotely - you can imagine the security implications of that.
There is an easy way to do this however.
I would build my windows VM, install all the required applications (leaving them as configured or not depending on your needs) then convert the VM into a template and then deploy new vms based on that template. Then you have your windows vms ready to go with the installed applications.
Currently I'm developing a pure C++ application in a virtual machine. My editor on virtual machine is VIM. But I want to use Qt creator as IDE. I tried ssh -X for running Qt creator on virtual machine. But it ran too slow to work with.
The process is too simple. I want to have source code in both machines. In local machine and virtual machine. Then I send modifications from local machine to virtual machine and when I press build button in Qt creator, a build script is executed in virtual machine to build the project. Output from virtual machine will be displayed in Qt Creator output panel.
For this purpose should I create a Qt Creator plugin?
I am not sure if you have a network that is connecting the two machines or not (local and virtual). If you have a network then you need to just share the project folder. In case you are using RedHat/CentOS/Fedora you can follow this link:
http://www.tecmint.com/how-to-setup-nfs-server-in-linux/
For Ubuntu you can always find a way too.
local machine should be the server and virtual machine should be the client.
In case the local machine is windows, then it would be easier, just follow this link:
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001636.htm
We develop a server-side solution and to ease its deployment we would like to provide our cutomers with two options:
1. Docker image
2. VM image in OVA format
The images should be automatically created by our build machine.
As of today, we use packer for this purpose. First we create docker image and then update that image in preconfigured virtual machine image (using 'virtualbox-ovf' builder). This works pretty well, but there are some problems with this solution.
First, our vm includes docker framework and two OSes (host's and docker's), so our VM image is ~twice bigger than docker. Second, to base our solution on another linux distro, we should manually configure new VM machine.
We are looking for 'Dockerfile'-style solution to create and configure VM automatically and then export it in OVA format. 'virtualbox-iso' builder is the obvious way to do this, but the building process will be much longer.
If you are willing to use Debian as your base OS then you could look at TurnKey Linux's TKLDev. It's probably a bit of a learning curve initially but it's a pretty cool thing IMO (although I'm very biased - see below disclaimer). TKLDev will build you a TurnKey (Debian based) ISO with your software installed on top. Then using Buildtasks you can convert the ISO to OVA, VMDK, LXC, Docker, OpenStack, etc...
Unfortunately Buildtasks is not very well documented but significant chunks of it are in bash so if you are handy with a Linux commandline you could work it out. Otherwise ask on the TurnKey forums.
The initial development (from Packer to TKLDev) may take a little while, but once the heavy lifting is done the creation of an ISO (in a guest VM on a moderm multicore CPU PC) takes about 10-15 mins and the OVA probably another ~5; Docker another ~5.
If you wanted to make it build automatically then you could use a hook to trigger a fresh TKLDev build (including the buildtasks image creation) everytime a commit was made to a repo. I know that git supports this but I assume that other version control systems allow something similar.
Also if the appliance that you are making is open source then perhaps it could be added to the TurnKey Linux library?
Disclaimer: I work with TurnKey Linux. :)
FWIW this is essentially the process we use to create our library of appliances in most virtualisation formats known to human kind!
I've been using VMWare Player for ages now for both Windows development on my Linux box and (more importantly) automated testing of Windows applications.
Basically what I do is to:
have my development VM running and I build my code and automatically transfer the install package to Linux.
when this shows up at Linux, automatically copy a "known-state", snapshot VM to my test work area (I say snapshot but it's really just a backup copy of the whole directory, not a real VMWare snapshot).
also automatically start the VM in the work area once it's copied.
the VM has a single never-changing startup script which pulls a real startup script from Linux and runs it.
that startup script is responsible for getting down the install package and doing a silent install.
it then runs a test suite and uploads results back to Linux where I have automated scripts which check them.
So, it's basically a one-button test process.
Now I notice more and more people seem to be using VirtualBox.
First off, I'd like to confirm that it can also do a similar thing, primarily being able to backup and restore whole VMs and having shared folders between VirtualBox and Linux.
Secondly, and this is the crux: I'd like to know if that has any concrete advantages over VMWare Player, especially for the automated testing jobs.
I switched to VirtualBox because of one concrete advantage, I wasn't able to setup the network as I wanted to in player. I don't remember if it was bridging or port-forward or whatever that didn't work, but something didn't work the way I wanted it to with the network-setup (cause I needed the pay-version for that) and thus I switched. Personally I've found that both have good and bad sides, but I still use virtualbox cause of that network-thing.
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..