Lately I’m playing a lot with virtualization features and for this I needed a rapid way to deploy from scratch new instances. First I had the virtual machines converted to templates, but then I had to rebuild from zero the entire ESXi environment and those images were gone.
I realized then it was more easier to have OVF images saved on a distributed storage and deploy them as soon as I need them. I start looking around Internet and I could not find something that suit my needs.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of OVF images around, but mostly have GUI and a lot of packages already installed that I do not need.
I wanted to have OVF files with low-end hardware and only CLI interface. Why should I download and deploy a 20 or 30 GB instance if the only things I need is CLI? From this I could customize it everytime exactly the way I wanted.
I started to create my OVF files and I’m pretty satisfied with them. Then I said why not to share them with the community?
I did chose Sourceforge to host my files because of their CDN and because it is free. On this blog I have to think how to organize them, because I don’t know if “post” format is the best idea. Until then, please find below the first two OVF images for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
All archives contain a text files with details about distro, user/passwd and services enabled. There may be other services enabled like postfix, but the listed ones are mandatory if you want network functionality and remote connection.
Here are the details for the below listed downloads:
Server images 32/64 bits
username: notroot
passwd: 123qweASD!username: root
passwd: firstdigest
HDD: 8GB, ext4, 1 partition, thin provision
RAM: 256 CPU Core: 1Services enabled:
SSHd
DHCP client
Downloads
If you encounter problems with these images please let me know here in Comments or on Sourceforge Project Discussions page.
In the upcoming days I will add here more images from different distros.
OVFs are a good starting place.
If you really want to get into quick lab setup and VM builds, check out http://www.vagrantup.com/
Thanks for input, I’ll have a look at it.