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

[Bryan Kearney]

Bryan Kearney wrote:
> 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.

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-- bk