Hi Karen, * Karen Tung (Karen.Tung 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. >> > With all the options that we can pass to > the VBoxManage to automatically configure a VM, > some are more important than others in terms of creating VM images, and > some of them would actually affect the resulting image. One of such > example that I can think of is the size of the virtual hard disk. Since > the content > of the virtual hard disk is the output of VM construction, I would think > that > people might want to specify their desired size. Other things > kinda have to be a certain way in order for things to work at all. > Examples of those are amount of memory and networking setting. > Without sufficient amount of memory, the ISO might not boot, IPS might not > work. Without networking setup correctly, we might not be able to install > from the IPS repo on the network. > Then, there are other options like sound support > that we would not need for creating VM images. > > Therefore, I don't think we should allow users to specify every single > possible option for creating a VM in a manifest, but I think we should > give them > the option to specify a few. Which ones, I don't know, I guess we > can discuss and decide as part of the overall design. > >> 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? >> >> > Allowing users to alternatively provided a pre-configured VM is also a > good idea, but I don't think this should be a required thing to do. > It should just be an option.
I quite agree. We'll construct a VM for the user unless they specify a pre-configured VM for our use is the way I'm leaning. Thanks Karen, -- Glenn
