Creating a CentOS based appliance

[mwixon]

Hi all -

I'm new to the forums but I've been using proxmox for several months now. Kudos to the developers. It is an awesome environment. I'm running both Windows 2003 server KVMs and several flavors of linux. It all works without a hitch. The Windows server migration instructions are spot on and it worked the first time for me.

My current challange is in creating a CentOS 4 based appliance. I have a particular install that I do over and over again that I'd like to virtualize and automate. Here is what I've done so far:

1) Downloaded the CentOS 4.7 appliance from the proxmox website. Works great.

2) Built a new OpenVZ VM and did all my installs / config.

3) Stopped the VM

4) Gziped it all up and put it in the /var/lib/vz/cache directory.

5) Started a new OpenVZ VM and based it on this new template.

When following the above procedure, during the create it says something like "Warning configuration file not found, using defaults".

The VM creates and runs ok, however it doesn't seem to take the hostname. The new VM hostname is based on the hostname from step 2.

Is the above procedure correct? Any thoughts on the missing configuration file or hostname issue?

Thanks for any advise!
-Mike

 

[martin]

Hi all -

I'm new to the forums but I've been using proxmox for several months now. Kudos to the developers. It is an awesome environment. I'm running both Windows 2003 server KVMs and several flavors of linux. It all works without a hitch. The Windows server migration instructions are spot on and it worked the first time for me.

My current challange is in creating a CentOS 4 based appliance. I have a particular install that I do over and over again that I'd like to virtualize and automate. Here is what I've done so far:

1) Downloaded the CentOS 4.7 appliance from the proxmox website. Works great.

2) Built a new OpenVZ VM and did all my installs / config.

3) Stopped the VM

4) Gziped it all up and put it in the /var/lib/vz/cache directory.

5) Started a new OpenVZ VM and based it on this new template.

When following the above procedure, during the create it says something like "Warning configuration file not found, using defaults".

The VM creates and runs ok, however it doesn't seem to take the hostname. The new VM hostname is based on the hostname from step 2.

Is the above procedure correct? Any thoughts on the missing configuration file or hostname issue?

Thanks for any advise!
-Mike

I am not a centos expert/user - I suggest you ask the OpenVZ community (first take a look on their wiki pages) as there are a lot of centos users.

FYI, we released an appliance builder exactly for this - dab. But currently only for Debian/Ubuntu based systems.

 

[mwixon]

Thanks for the reply. So it sounds like you are saying that the template format is just the OpenVZ format, with nothing added by Proxmox, is that correct?

 

[martin]

Thanks for the reply. So it sounds like you are saying that the template format is just the OpenVZ format, with nothing added by Proxmox, is that correct?

yes, thats true.

 

[dietmar]

Is the above procedure correct? Any thoughts on the missing configuration file or hostname issue?

The configuration is stored in /etc/vz/conf/XXX.conf

 

[mwixon]

Thank you. It also looks like there are configurations for each dist in /etc/vz/dists and it appears there is one in here for CentOS-4. I guess the questions is how do I link my repackaged centos template to the centos-4.conf file in /etc/vz/dists? It looks like there are special rules in here for setting the hostname and networking.

I've been hunting over in the openvz forums but haven't found a solution yet.

Thanks
-Mike

 

[mwixon]

Actually I just figured it out. Thanks to everyone here. I had not called my template "centos-4.xxx" - it looks like it does a simple text match on the file name to figure out which conf file to use. I renamed it and everything is working properly now.

Thanks Again!
-Mike