FYI: A fedora 17 cloud image

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 04:02:10PM +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 11/16/2012 03:51 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> >On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 02:31:40PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >>They're completely different from Oz really, except that both can
> >>use kickstart files for their automation.
> >
> >We've got other tools along these lines too:
> >
> >>appliance-creator is basically running yum in a chroot
> >>and handling the kickstart config itself.
> >
> >ami-creator (from Jeremy Katz and also maintained by Eucalyptus) does this
> >as well.
> >
> >>Oz boots KVM and runs the *real* installer in a guest,
> >>providing it with the kickstart.
> >
> >And this is also done by the new livemedia-creator from the Anaconda team.
> 
> So which one is the "best" now? In terms of community, momentum,
> features? What should we be using for virtual image creation for
> (for example) oVirt and OpenStack?

Oz is the only real candidate here because it is the only one that is
seriously targetting arbitrary guest OS distros, including Windows

  https://github.com/clalancette/oz/wiki

so I discount appliance-creatoe/ami-creator/livemedia-creator as
suitable for ovirt/OpenStack.

That said, we have broader plans in this area which will obsolete Oz
to some degree. Oz does really 3 things

 - Code to determine how to create a KVM instance for installing
   each OS
 - Kickstart file (or equivalent file for other distros)
 - Code to install further packages to the initial image.

The libosinfo library is providing a database of metadata about optimal
hardware configuration for OS, so the hardcoded setup that Oz does should
really all go away long term, and be replaced by metadata driven code.

Similarly the libosinfo library also decided that handling kickstart
file generation is also within its scope. So again Oz code in this
area should go away long term.

That leaves the only bit of truely Oz specific code being that which
customizes the images post-install to add further packages. So the
quesiton is whether this is useful enough to apps to justify them
using Oz.

I really see oVirt / OpenStack (and virt-manager, virt-install, GNOME
Boxes, and any other virt management app) as wanting to use libosinfo
directly for doing most of the work for VM provisioning and/or image
building. Using Oz likely won't buy them a whole lot of extra benefit.
I see Oz remaining as primarily a end user command line tool for building
images

Regards,
Daniel
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