In this article, we will be walking through the building of Redhat Enterprise Linux 7/CentOS 7 VM using ISO on VMware vSphere environment. Packer is very useful to build your base images on the cloud and on-premise. Packer is an opensource tool and developed by HashiCorp. HashiCorp owns very famous tools like Vagrant, Consul, and Terraform. Today, Cloning and deploying is the most convenient way of building VM’s. In some cases, the required version of OS template might not exist, You might need to build VM’s in Adhoc. That’s where Packer is very handy. Refer to this article if you want to automate the template creation.
Let’s start coding the new Infrastructure.
Download the following components:
- JetBrains-infra vSphere-iso (File Name: packer-builder-vsphere-iso.exe)
- Packer (Download according to your laptop OS )
- Redhat Enterprise Linux 7.x or CentOS 7.x ISO.
On Your Laptop/Desktop,
1. Create a new directory and copy all the downloaded components. RHEL/ CentOS ISO should be kept 0n VMware vSphere datastore.
2. Open a notepad and paste the following contents to it. Edit all the required values according to your infrastructure. Save this file as CentOS7_build.json on the same directory.
{
"builders": [
{
"type": "vsphere-iso",
"vcenter_server": "192.168.2.212",
"username": "administrator@vsphere.local",
"password": "test@123",
"insecure_connection": "true",
"vm_name": "RHEL-Packer1",
"notes": "Build via Packer",
"datacenter": "STACK-BLR",
"cluster": "UA-CLS",
"host": "192.168.2.211",
"datastore": "DATASTORE-BLR",
"network": "VM Network",
"resource_pool": "UA-ResPool",
"guest_os_type": "centos7_64Guest",
"ssh_username": "root",
"ssh_password": "server",
"CPUs": 1,
"RAM": 1024,
"RAM_reserve_all": false,
"convert_to_template": false,
"disk_controller_type": "pvscsi",
"disk_size": 25000,
"disk_thin_provisioned": true,
"network_card": "vmxnet3",
"iso_paths": [
"[DATASTORE-BLR] ISO/centos7_64.iso"
],
"iso_checksum": "5b61d5b378502e9cba8ba26b6696c92a",
"iso_checksum_type": "md5",
"floppy_files": [
"{{template_dir}}/ks.cfg"
],
"boot_command": " inst.text inst.ks=hd:fd0:/ks.cfg "
}
]
}
You might need to update the value for almost all the fields except the boot_command, networ_card, disk_controller_type, and provision type.
3. You need to prepare traditional kickstart file to define the package selection and other configuration. Download this kickstart file for RHEL 7 / CentOS 7. Please feel free to modify and update the kickstart file according to our need.
- Root Credentials – root/server
- User – admin/admin123
4. Here is the snapshot of the directory contents.
5. Open command prompt – Start – > cmd – > Enter. Navigate to the directory which we have created for this VM build.
6. Trigger the packer build job using the following command. At this stage, the VM job is waiting for VM to boot with IP.
C:\Users\lingeswaran.rangasam\Desktop\Redhat-Packer-Test>packer.exe build CentOS7_build.json
vsphere-iso output will be in this color.
==> vsphere-iso: Creating VM...
==> vsphere-iso: Customizing hardware...
==> vsphere-iso: Mount ISO images...
==> vsphere-iso: Creating floppy disk...
vsphere-iso: Copying files flatly from floppy_files
vsphere-iso: Copying file: C:\Users\lingeswaran.rangasam\Desktop\Redhat-Packer-Test/ks.cfg
vsphere-iso: Done copying files from floppy_files
vsphere-iso: Collecting paths from floppy_dirs
vsphere-iso: Resulting paths from floppy_dirs : []
vsphere-iso: Done copying paths from floppy_dirs
==> vsphere-iso: Uploading created floppy image
==> vsphere-iso: Adding generated Floppy...
==> vsphere-iso: Set boot order temporary...
==> vsphere-iso: Power on VM...
==> vsphere-iso: Waiting 10s for boot...
==> vsphere-iso: Typing boot command...
==> vsphere-iso: Waiting for IP...
7. If you navigate to the vCenter console, you could see that VM might be created and powered on.
8. Launch VM console and observe the automatic build.
9. VM is starting the automated install using the kickstart file.
10. VM is automatically provisioning the required filesystem layout using LVM.
11. Here is the packer build job result after the successfully VM build completion.
C:\Users\lingeswaran.rangasam\Desktop\Redhat-Packer-Test>packer.exe build CentOS7_build.json
vsphere-iso output will be in this color.
==> vsphere-iso: Creating VM...
==> vsphere-iso: Customizing hardware...
==> vsphere-iso: Mount ISO images...
==> vsphere-iso: Creating floppy disk...
vsphere-iso: Copying files flatly from floppy_files
vsphere-iso: Copying file: C:\Users\lingeswaran.rangasam\Desktop\Redhat-Packer-Test/ks.cfg
vsphere-iso: Done copying files from floppy_files
vsphere-iso: Collecting paths from floppy_dirs
vsphere-iso: Resulting paths from floppy_dirs : []
vsphere-iso: Done copying paths from floppy_dirs
==> vsphere-iso: Uploading created floppy image
==> vsphere-iso: Adding generated Floppy...
==> vsphere-iso: Set boot order temporary...
==> vsphere-iso: Power on VM...
==> vsphere-iso: Waiting 10s for boot...
==> vsphere-iso: Typing boot command...
==> vsphere-iso: Waiting for IP...
==> vsphere-iso: IP address: 192.168.2.7
==> vsphere-iso: Using ssh communicator to connect: 192.168.2.7
==> vsphere-iso: Waiting for SSH to become available...
==> vsphere-iso: Connected to SSH!
==> vsphere-iso: Shut down VM...
==> vsphere-iso: Deleting Floppy drives...
==> vsphere-iso: Deleting Floppy image...
==> vsphere-iso: Eject CD-ROM drives...
==> vsphere-iso: Clear boot order...
Build 'vsphere-iso' finished.
==> Builds finished. The artifacts of successful builds are:
--> vsphere-iso: RHEL-Packer1
C:\Users\lingeswaran.rangasam\Desktop\Redhat-Packer-Test>
12. Log in to the VM instance and check the status.
login as: root root@192.168.2.7's password: [root@UnixArena ~]# [root@UnixArena ~]# [root@UnixArena ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/VolGroup-LogVol06 17G 1.3G 16G 8% / devtmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /dev tmpfs 496M 0 496M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 496M 7.1M 489M 2% /run tmpfs 496M 0 496M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/mapper/VolGroup-LogVol02 1014M 33M 982M 4% /home /dev/mapper/VolGroup-LogVol01 1014M 33M 982M 4% /tmp /dev/mapper/VolGroup-LogVol03 2.0G 101M 1.9G 5% /var /dev/mapper/VolGroup-LogVol04 1014M 36M 979M 4% /var/log /dev/mapper/VolGroup-LogVol05 509M 26M 483M 6% /var/log/audit /dev/sda1 509M 129M 381M 26% /boot tmpfs 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user/0 [root@UnixArena ~]# vgs VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree VolGroup 1 7 0 wz--n- 23.91g 0 [root@UnixArena ~]# pvs PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree /dev/sda2 VolGroup lvm2 a-- 23.91g 0 [root@UnixArena ~]# lvs LV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Meta% Move Log Cpy%Sy nc Convert LogVol01 VolGroup -wi-ao---- 1.00g LogVol02 VolGroup -wi-ao---- 1.00g LogVol03 VolGroup -wi-ao---- 2.00g LogVol04 VolGroup -wi-ao---- 1.00g LogVol05 VolGroup -wi-ao---- 512.00m LogVol06 VolGroup -wi-ao---- 16.44g lv_swap VolGroup -wi-ao---- <1.97g [root@UnixArena ~]# which lsof /usr/sbin/lsof [root@UnixArena ~]#
We have successfully created VM and build RHEL7/CentOS7 using ISO with a legacy kickstart file. In the upcoming article, we will see how to make the VM template using a packer.
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Dinesh Balendran says
Brilliant article.