On Fri, 13 Nov 2015 09:23:43 -0700 Tim Flink tflink@redhat.com wrote:
<snip>
If we intended to mostly build those images on dev's computers, I'd probably prefer virt-builder. But my current impression is that local building will be a secondary option, and we'll primarily offer pre-created images for download (even downloading them automatically). Which makes sense, it's easier for the dev, and less error-prone. So in that light (assuming no one has different plans in mind), it doesn't really matter which technology we choose to build it. Image size is a factor here, though. I don't have any real numbers here, it would be very interesting to see the same image (same package set, same filesystem size) built by both tools and compare the output size (ideally even after running zerofree on them and compressing them). My guess is that they should have the same size (what would cause a difference?), but we might be surprised. Do we have a volunteer to test this? :)
I can give this a try later today - I have both tools installed on a machine here.
I've created images for taskotron using both taskotron-vmbuilder and imagefactory. They're similar but not identical - I based the imagefactory off the F22 cloud images instead of specifying the server group install and virt-builder has some restrictions on what you can do with disk space which imagefactory does not have.
I've put all the files up for review: the kickstart for imagefactory, the yaml file for vmbuilder and both created images, gzipped.
https://tflink.fedorapeople.org/taskotron/testimages/
Time of creation operation -------------------------- imagefactory: 16m6.596s vmbuilder: 7m19.273s
Image sizes ----------- 20151113-taskotron_server-22.qcow2.gz 818M 20151113-taskotron_server-22.qcow2 11G 20151113-imagebuilder-taskotron.qcow 3.0G 20151113-imagebuilder-taskotron.qcow.gz 358M