I'm happy to announce FAI 5.2, the newest version of the Fully Automatic Installation tool set, which now supports creating disk images for virtual machines. You can create a customized virtual machine image in less than a minute[1], which is then run in your virtualization environment like KVM, VMware or VirtualBox. It can also be used for booting a guest on your cloud platform.
FAI can create images for different Linux distributions and provides out-of-the-box configurations for Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS. These images can be used for virtual machines or bare metal. Examples of the log files for several installations can be found at [2]. The new command fai-diskimage uses the normal FAI process for building disk images of different formats. An image with a small set of packages can be created in less than 50 seconds, a Debian XFCE desktop in nearly two minutes and a complete Ubuntu 16.04 desktop image is created in four minutes. fai-kvm, the command for easy starting a KVM virtual machine was enhanced to boot from an image created by fai-diskimage. It also boots a KVM host from CD or from network via PXE. FAI 5.2 includes many minor improvements in the configuration examples and a lot of test cases where done for this release. The new FAI CD images now are available at [3]. The homepage of FAI is: http://fai-project.org ================================================== About FAI FAI is a set of tools for mass unattended Linux installations of different Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and others. FAI provides network installations from the FAI server or creating customized installation media for CD and USB stick. Was was started in 1999 and is used for desktop deployments, building servers or installing huge compute clusters. Some FAI users are: - The Internet archive (archive.org) using FAI for nearly 1200 bare-metal machines and 800 KVM machines - The City of Munich deploys 16000 desktops using FAI - Stayfriends (700 hosts) - LVM german insurance (10.000 hosts) - Albert Einstein Institute, 1725 hosts mostly compute nodes - Stanford University, 450 hosts More than 300 detailed user reports can be found at [4] [1] http://fai-project.org/logs/fai-diskimage.log [2] http://fai-project.org/logs/ [3] http://fai-project.org/fai-cd/ [4] http://fai-project.org/reports/ -- regards Thomas