Re: which tool should I use to customize a vm ?

[Tim Sattarov <stimur@gmail.com>]

I am also very interested in this topic.
I currently in need of building a bare minimum image for AWS. My current approach is to use FAI 
inside of Packer script.
- Packer prepares the build machine (dependencies, tools, etc.)
- FAI builds the disk image
- I clone the image to EBS volume and convert it to AMI.

I wonder if there is better way to do that. Can I build an image without FAI using pure Packer?

Thanks

On 2022-05-30 10:07, Brian Metzler wrote:
> If you are starting from scratch there are two ways to go:
> 1.) Start with the Cloud images available here:
> https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/
> Spin up a VM in openstack, make your needed modifications, then create an image of that VM.
>
> 2.) Start fresh with the Debian ISO and use hashicorp packer to preseed a VM with the qemu 
> plugin.  This will allow you to script out creation of the image, allow for post processing of the 
> vm through SSH and then you can pass the output image through qemu-img to convert it to the image 
> format you need to upload to Openstack Glance.
>
> Once here you can spin up a VM in Openstack and use cloud-init to do any final customizations you 
> need.
>
> I use #2 in my day-to-day work, to keep images up to date for my stakeholders.  It allows you to 
> script everything out without having to do anything manually.
>
> *If you have to do anything more than once, script it.*
>
> -Brian
>
> On Mon, May 30, 2022, 8:12 AM PICCA Frederic-Emmanuel 
> <frederic-emmanuel.picca@synchrotron-soleil.fr> wrote:
>
>     Hello, I think that  this question was resolved a long time ago, but I did not found an answer
>     from the cloud team.
>
>     I need to create a bunch of vm image for an openstack instance. In this images, we need to
>     install a bunch of software, Debian packages, pure binary packages, and does some
>     customisation of the configuration for these packages.
>     So I would like to know which tool should be use for this purpose.
>
>     thanks for your consideration and I am sorry if this question has already a definitive answer :)
>
>     Cheers
>
>     Frederic