Glenn Lagasse wrote: > One part of the automated VM construction project is that we'll need to > have a VM to install in to. My original thought was that using > VirtualBox's cli VBoxManage, DC could configure a VM with either a > vanilla set of options statically or configure the VM using data > supplied in a manifest. The issue I see is that there are a LOT of > options that one can set for a VM. And providing support for all of > them in a manifest is going to be unwieldy. Using a vanilla set of > options could work, but then we have to decide what those settings are > and do they provide what users (those creating the virtual appliances) > will want. > > The third option is to have DC take the name of a pre-configured VM from > a manifest and use that to install in to. This would require the user > running DC to create and configure a VM in VirtualBox before running DC > and supplying the name (and possibly a few other bits of relevant > information) in the manifest used to create the virtual appliance. > This option allows us to not 're-invent the wheel' as it were in terms > of configuring VMs but does require some manual setup on the part of the > user before he can actually create his virtual appliance (instead of > just modifying a manifest and running distro_const build). > > Thoughts? > > How about offering both ways. That is, we allow users to have a predefined VM they want us to use, or we create it for them, with whatever set of options for configuring the VM.
Basically, they would have to specify a "target" in which to do the install. It could be a VM or could be a VM type with options, which we create. sarah
