Glenn Lagasse wrote: > 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. >
Let's also keep in mind that if we modularize this appropriately, it should be possible for the advanced user to plug in an alternate VM creation "step" which could do whatever. Dave
