Hi Sarah, * Sarah Jelinek (Sarah.Jelinek at Sun.COM) wrote: > 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.
Yep, I think this is what we're going to do. We'll come up with a 'default' set of VM options that we'll use to configure a new VM but we'll also allow the user to specify a pre-configured VM to use as an install target. Thanks Sarah, -- Glenn
