[Engine-devel] Cloud-Init integration

[Greg Padgett]

Hi Itamar,

On 04/20/2013 04:52 PM, Itamar Heim wrote:
> On 03/29/2013 01:35 AM, Greg Padgett wrote:
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> I'd like to propose a feature we've been doing some investigation into,
>> which is to integrate cloud-init support into oVirt.
>>
>> Cloud-init is used to help provision new Linux systems by setting the
>> hostname, ip, ssh keys, timezone, injecting files, and more.  It's used
>> by OpenStack (amongst others) now, and has a lot of features that may be
>> helpful to our users.
>>
>> Details are still evolving, but for more info please see the wiki page:
>>
>> http://www.ovirt.org/Features/Cloud-Init_Integration
>>
>> All feedback is welcome!
>
> a few questions:
> - are you planning to save the info in the db by field, or as a single
>    "blob"? maybe a better questions is are you going to persist it at
>    all?

No persistence yet, but when that time comes I'd prefer to store the 
fields (either separately or a standard serialized format), rather than 
storing the generated blob.  Easier to retrieve/modify.

> - i'd be careful before passing any passwords (page mentions root
>    password) - you'd need to not persist it unecrypted, identify it and
>    clean it from all logs, etc.

I've looked into this a little: cloud-init will accept a password that's 
been crypt(3)'ed, and Apache Commons Codec has a Crypt API that will do 
this--but not in our version, it's new in 1.7.  So, still considering 
alternatives.

> - hostname - should just assume the vm name?

Sure, how about pre-populating the field?  The user would see that we're 
setting the hostname and be able to change it if desired.

> - timezone - is that different than the windows one? for a windows
>    guest as well?

AFAICT, a healthy subset of timezones can be mapped cleanly between 
Linux/Java/Windows representations, and the Java timezone ids look to be a 
fairly good match for the timezone files used in Linux.  I hope we don't 
have to show different timezone selections based on OS type, but not sure 
yet.  (Should know soon, I'm looking into all this now.)

>
> Thanks,
>     Itamar
>