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Introduction

CloudStack uses virtual appliances as part of its orchestration. For example, it uses virtual routers for SDN, secondary storage vm for snapshots, templates etc. All these service appliances are created off a template called a systemvm template in CloudStack’s terminologies. This template appliance is patched to create secondary storage vm, console proxy vm or router vm. There was an old way of building systemvms in patches/systemvm/debian/buildsystemvm.sh which is no longer maintained and we wanted to have a way for hackers to just build systemvms on their own box.

Build your own systemvm template (BYO SystemVMs) allows anyone to customize and build their own systemvm template. SystemVM template is an appliance which gets patched by CloudStack's systemvm.iso on a host before it becomes one of the service VMs: ssvm, cpvm or rvm. To make it possible for anyone to BYO systemvm template, we researched and found that it was possible for everyone to install VirtualBox, create and setup a VM, install all the tools and export it. To automate the process we've used veewee, an opensource appliance building tool, that automates the process of appliance building on VirtualBox and we use some tools to export the disk image to various formats.

For latest update, follow the README and build script at:

https://github.com/apache/cloudstack/tree/master/tools/appliance

Scope and Assumptions

Veewee [3] uses some definition with which it would automatically download and install a Linux distro on VirtualBox. Since the previous systemvm templates provided by Citrix was based on Debian, we created veewee definitions that are based on Debian. The definitions are located in: tools/appliance/definitions/*

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The following daily jenkins build job [2] creates systemvms from master branch:

httphttps://jenkinsbuilds.cloudstack.org/jobview/build-systemvm-masterhttp://jenkins.cloudstack.org/job/build-systemvm64master-mastersystemvm/

To use these systemvm templates, download the template and use cloud-install-sys-tmplt to preseed systemvm templates as documented on the installation docs [4], or extract and copy the template to appropriate secondary storage path for ex. for Xen: template/tmpl/1/1/

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3. Using ovftool, export VMWare compatible ova:

/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/ovftool --compress=9 ~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/systemvmtemplate-vmware.vmwarevm/systemvmtemplate-vmware.vmx /Bhaisaab/systemvmtemplate-vmware.ova

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2. Setting up a jenkins job for automating systemvm template building: http://rohityadavrohit.yadav.inxyz/logs/building-systemvms/

3. Veewee: https://github.com/jedi4ever/veewee/

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