Building CAPI Images for Nutanix Cloud Platform

Prerequisites for Nutanix builder

# If you don't have the image-builder repository
$ git clone https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/image-builder.git

$ cd image-builder/images/capi/
# Run the target make deps-nutanix to install Ansible and Packer
$ make deps-nutanix

Configure the Nutanix builder

Complete the packer/nutanix/nutanix.json configuration file with credentials and informations specific to the Nutanix Prism Central used to build the image. This file must have the following format:

{
    "force_deregister": "true",
    "image_export": "false",
    "nutanix_cluster_name": "Name of PE Cluster",
    "nutanix_endpoint": "Prism Central IP / FQDN",
    "nutanix_insecure": "false",
    "nutanix_password": "PrismCentral_Password",
    "nutanix_port": "9440",
    "nutanix_subnet_name": "Name of Subnet",
    "nutanix_username": "PrismCentral_Username",
    "scp_extra_vars": ""
}

If you are using a recent OpenSSH_9 version, adding the -O value in scp_extra_vars may be necessary for servers that do not implement a recent SFTP protocol.

Customizing the Build Process

The builder uses a generic cloud image as source which is basically configured by a cloud-init script. It is also possible to start build-process from an ISO-Image as long as injecting Kickstart or similiar is possible via OEMDRV Media. For more details refer to packer-plugin-nutanix Documentation.

If you prefer to use a different configuration file, you can create it with the same format and export PACKER_VAR_FILES environment variable containing the full path to it.

Run the Make target to generate Nutanix images.

From images/capi directory, run make build-nutanix-<os>-<version> command depending on which os and version you want to build the image for.

For example, to build an image for Ubuntu 22.04, run

$ make build-nutanix-ubuntu-2204

To build all Nutanix ubuntu images, run

make build-nutanix-all

Configuration

The nutanix sub-directory inside images/capi/packer stores JSON configuration files for each OS including necessary config.