Hi,
At PCextreme ( https://www.pcextreme.com/ ) we have thousands of Virtual
Machines running on Apache CloudStack with the KVM hypervisor.
One of the things which is always a challenge is having proper templates
which you can use to deploy Virtual Machines rapidly.
We use the Packer tool to build templates for VMs on CloudStack. The
code for building these is available on Github:
https://github.com/PCextreme/packer-templates/
The resulting QCOW2 files are uploaded to a public S3 bucket:
https://compute.o.auroraobjects.eu/
For example, the Ubuntu 20.04 template from 18-03-2021 can be found here:
https://compute.o.auroraobjects.eu/templates/ubuntu-20.04_master_240a36d2.qcow2
Gitlab's CI/CD is used to build these templates and successful builds of
the master branch are pushed to S3.
The templates support:
- Growing the root disk upon first boot
- CloudStack password server (via cloud-init)
- cloud-init userdata
The PCextreme IPv6 recursive DNS servers are harcoded into these
templates which make them not suitable for all deployments, but you can
use the code to easily build your own templates.
Hope this helps!
Wido
