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

[Simone Tiraboschi]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bob Doolittle" <bob at doolittle.us.com>
> To: "Simone Tiraboschi" <stirabos at redhat.com>, devel at ovirt.org, "users-ovirt" <users at ovirt.org>
> Cc: "Fabian Deutsch" <fdeutsch at redhat.com>
> Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2015 3:54:27 PM
> Subject: Re: [ovirt-devel] oVirt node, hosted-engine, oVirt appliance and cloud-init
> 
> On 03/12/2015 10:02 AM, Simone Tiraboschi wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Great suggestions, Simone!
> 
> The things you list cover most of what I do to the engine VM (I do all of
> those except for "configure ssh private keys"). In addition, I:
> 
>   * Add a couple of packages (e.g. zsh)
>   * Configure alternate shells for some initial users (this could be "run a
>   command on the first boot", as long as adding the necessary packages was
>   done before that somehow, perhaps simply as a prior command)
>   * Populate some specific files, e.g.:
>       o Add specific ssh *public* keys into the $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys
>       files for some user and root accounts
>       o Replace /etc/hosts with a master copy that contains all hosts on my
>       network
> 
> 
> I'd like to see the "additional packages" abstracted out somehow and added
> prior to the "run a command on the first boot" step, as opposed to using
> "yum" explicitly for one of those commands, but that's somewhat of a
> cosmetic "nice to have" since obviously it can be done explicitly. It's
> separate conceptually, so would be nice to treat as such.

It's already designed like that in cloud-init:
http://cloudinit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/examples.html#install-arbitrary-packages

> I'm learning Puppet at the moment, and it strikes me that what you want to do
> is pretty much the same thing that Puppet manifests are designed to do.

You could also setup an run puppet from cloud-init:
http://cloudinit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/examples.html#setup-and-run-puppet

> Thanks,
>    Bob
> 
> >
> > thanks,
> > Simone
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> 
>