* Joseph J. VLcek (Joseph.Vlcek at Sun.COM) wrote: > Karen Tung 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. >> >> --Karen >> _______________________________________________ >> caiman-discuss mailing list >> caiman-discuss at opensolaris.org >> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss > I think allowing the user to provide VM configuration parameters in a > manifest would make it less easy to use.
Yeah, there's far too many possible options to support that in a manifest. I think we can have a default config for new VMs which we use to create the VM unless the user specified a pre-configured VM for us to use. We might also allow some customization of the default config in the manifest for a select few VM parameters (size of disk, size of ram for instance). Thanks Joe, -- Glenn
