Building Images for CloudStack

Hypervisor

The image is built using KVM hypervisor as a qcow2 image. Following which, it can be converted into ova for VMware and vhd for XenServer.

Prerequisites for building images

Images can only be built on Linux Machines, and has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Execute the following command to install qemu-kvm and other packages if you are running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Installing packages to use qemu-img

$ sudo -i
# apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin qemu-utils

If you’re on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, then execute the following command to install qemu-kvm packages.

$ sudo -i
# apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-clients virtinst cpu-checker libguestfs-tools libosinfo-bin

Adding your user to the kvm group

$ sudo usermod -a -G kvm <yourusername>
$ sudo chown root:kvm /dev/kvm

Then exit and log back in to make the change take place.

Building Images

The build prerequisites for using image-builder for building cloudstack images are managed by running:

$ cd image-builder/images/capi
$ make deps-qemu

From the images/capi directory, run make build-qemu-xxxx-yyyy. The image is built and located in images/capi/output/BUILD_NAME+kube-KUBERNETES_VERSION. Please replace xxxx with the OS distribution and yyyy with the OS version depending on WHAT you want to build the image for.

For building a ubuntu-2004 based CAPI image, run the following commands -

$ git clone https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/image-builder.git
$ cd image-builder/images/capi/
$ cat > extra_vars.json <<EOF
{
  "ansible_user_vars": "provider=cloudstack"
}
EOF
$ PACKER_VAR_FILES=extra_vars.json make clean build-qemu-ubuntu-2004

XenServer Hypervisor

Run the following script to ensure the required dependencies are met :

$ ./hack/ensure-vhdutil.sh

Follow the preceding steps to build the qcow2 CAPI template for KVM. It will display the location of the template to the terminal as shown :

$ make build-qemu-ubuntu-2004
.............................
Builds finished. The artifacts of successful builds are:
qemu: VM files in directory: ./output/ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.21.10

Here the build-name is ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.21.10

One completed, run the following commands to convert the template to a XenServer compatible template

$ ./hack/convert-cloudstack-image.sh ./output/<build-name>/<build-name> x

Creating XenServer Export for ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.21.10
NOTE: For better performance, we will do the overwritten convert!
Done! Convert to ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.21.10.vhd.
Back up source to ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.21.10.vhd.bak.
Converting to ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.21.10-xen.vhd.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Done!
Created .vhd file, now zipping
ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.21.10 exported for XenServer: ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.21.10-xen.vhd.bz2

VMware Hypervisor