CentOS virt - Oct 2008 - pre-built images

Tru has already been building vmware images ( 
http://people.centos.org/tru/vmware/ ) for various roles.

I was wondering if there was any interest in prebuilt Xen images as well 
? And if so, what would be the roles people would want images done for, 
and what might be suiteable package sets to include for those roles.

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq

On 10/18/2008 02:38 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Tru has already been building vmware images ( 
> http://people.centos.org/tru/vmware/ ) for various roles.
>
>  I was wondering if there was any interest in prebuilt Xen images as 
> well ?
Oh, yes, please !
> And if so, what would be the roles people would want images done for, 
> and what might be suiteable package sets to include for those roles.
>
for me a minimal system would be enough. But by minimal I mean only vi 
and yum functional. Nothing else. Especially not the dozens of packages 
brought in by @base.

Greetings,

It's me again to mention OpenVZ.  I maintain some CentOS OS Templates for
OpenVZ and update them on about a monthly basis.  I usually don't have
trouble having an OS Template out for a new release on the day of the release
(example CentOS 4.7 and 5.2).

You can find them here:

http://download.openvz.org/template/precreated/contrib/

You can actually find a number of OS Templates for CentOS on the openvz.org
website but I believe mine (as you can see in the "contrib" directory)
are the only ones that are refreshed periodically.  As I write this, the current
ones are:

centos-4-i386-default-4.7-20081013.tar.gz   13-Oct-2008 22:40  108M
centos-4-x86_64-default-4.7-20081013.tar.gz 13-Oct-2008 22:43  115M
centos-5-i386-default-5.2-20081013.tar.gz   13-Oct-2008 22:47  117M
centos-5-x86_64-default-5.2-20081013.tar.gz 13-Oct-2008 22:50  124M

Those OS Templates probably have a little more software in them than some of the
smaller ones (I like having links, mc, nano, and screen) and yes yum is
installed.

While I don't have experience with any, it is my understanding that
some/many commercial hosting providers that offer "VPS" accounts that
are OpenVZ (or Parallels Virtuzzo Containers) based often have somewhat dated,
minimalistic setups... often without yum even installed... which can be very
problematic.  I know the IRC #centos channel on freenode really doesn't like
to get questions from cut rate account VPS users running CentOS containers,
especially if they are missing some somewhat common packages and don't have
an easy way to install them (no yum).

Speaking of OpenVZ OS Templates but getting a little off topic with non-CentOS
info, an OpenVZ community member (Robert Nelson) has been working on a new OS
Template build system he calls "vzpkg2" and "pkg-cacher" (a
modified version of Debian's apt-cacher) that makes it easy to build OS
Templates for Fedora, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu... 44 different combinations
when you consider the various distro release versions and both the i386 and
x86_64 arches.  While vzpkg2 is still hasn't been added as a stock OpenVZ
package, I've been testing it and it works great.  It is easy to build YOUR
OWN OS Templates from scratch and in a network efficient way (with the help of
pkg-cacher).  I was able to build all 44 OS Templates in just a couple of hours
with a broadband connection.

What's an OS Template?  Basically it is install media for a Linux
distribution from which you can make a container in about a minute.  I did an
interview with Robert Nelson and wrote up a more complete explanation on OS
Templates which you can find here:

http://www.montanalinux.org/robert-nelson-interview.html

I really recommend using CentOS as an OpenVZ host node distro.  Why?  You can
find out in the OpenVZ HOWTO I wrote for the CentOS wiki here:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Virtualization/OpenVZ

Questions, comments, suggestions?  Feel free to email me directly (dowdle at
montanalinux.org) or this list.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]