[Thincrust-devel] How to create a new appliance?

[Bryan Kearney]

Sharad Mishra wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to understand what will it take to create, deploy and 
> activate a new thincrust appliance. Do you think following steps will work?
> 
> 1. Install prerequisite virt tools (libvirt-python, virtinst etc.).
> 2. Install appliance-os.
> 3. Install appliance-tools
> 4. Create a kickstart file for the appliance.
> 5. Build appliance from kickstart file.
> 6. Launch the image using virt-image.
> 
> Will the above steps generate puppet recipe file? If not, How do I 
> create one. If yes, Which step created it.
> I guess the recipe file needs to be installed on the appliance machine. 
> How does it get installed there?


Sharad:

Thank you for looking at Thincrust. The most basic steps to build an 
appliance are to install the appliance-tools and python-virtinst 
packages which are available in F9 and F10.  You then create a kickstart 
file which describes your appliance. You run the following command as root:

appliance-creator --name foo --config foo.ks

And it willc create a foo.xml file which is a descriptor for virt-image 
and a raw disk file. You can then install the image with:

virt-image foo.xml

And connect to it via virsh or via virt-manager

If you are concerned about size, I would suggest that you appliance-os 
package which is availble on the thincrust site [1] or the aos spin 
kickstart file [2]

Thincrust also has an Appliance Configuration Tool which allows you to 
run puppet on each boot. This allows you to delay configuration of the 
appliance until it is delivered. You can follow the setup steps [3] or 
look at some examples [4]. The basic model is to package your recipe as 
an rpm, and add it to the kickstart file, and then use the 
appliance-tool above to build the appliance.

Please let me know if you have any qeustions or comments on the code or 
the documentation.

-- bk

[1] http://thincrust.net/repo/
[2] 
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/spin-kickstarts.git?p=spin-kickstarts.git;a=blob;f=fedora-aos.ks;
[3] http://thincrust.net/ace-setup.html
[4] http://thincrust.net/ace-examples.html