[ovirt-devel] oVirt node, hosted-engine, oVirt appliance and cloud-init

[Simone Tiraboschi]

Hi all,
cloud-init is a powerful tool to configure from outside a cloud instance or an appliance as in our scenario.

Deploying the engine as an appliance is indeed a good way to speed up and make easier the hosted-engine deployment: you don't need to install an OS on the engine virtual machine and than install the engine and so on but you could simply run a ready to use oVirt engine appliance. But you still need to configure it and so cloud-init support within hosted-engine is a reasonable way to complement it.

Then we could also integrate it with oVirt node to let the user input the required info from node TUI in order to have an almost unattended hosted-engine setup on oVirt node using an engine appliance with cloud-init.

The idea is to collect the required information interactively from hosted-engine setup or from node TUI (passing them to hosted-engine setup via an answer file) and pass them to the appliance via cloud-init using a no-cloud datasource.

So now the question is what do you really want to configure via cloud-init?
It's just to define what we want in order to be more focused on user needs:
for instance we could configure engine VM instance hostname, we could set the root password, we could create other users, we could upload ssh private keys, we could run a command on the first boot and so on.
So, if you have any ideas or requirement about that it's the right time for it.

thanks,
Simone