VMware Integrated OpenStack Glance Image Best Practices

A production cloud isn’t very efficacious unless users have the ability to run virtual machine images required by their application.  A cloud image is a single file that contains a virtual disk that has an operating system.  For many organizations, the simplest way to obtain a virtual machine image is to download a prebuilt base cloud image with a pre-packaged version of cloud-init to support user-data injection.  Once downloaded, an organization would leverage tools such as Packer to further customize and harden on top of the base image before rolling to production.  Most operating system projects and vendors maintain official images for direct download.  Openstack.org maintains a list of most commonly used images here.

Recently we received some queries about the proper way to import prebuilt QCOW2 native cloud images into VMware Integrated OpenStack.  Images import correctly, but would not successfully boot.  Common symptoms are “no Operating System found” messages generated by the virtual machine’s BIOS, the guest OS hanging during the boot cycle, or DHCP failure when trying to acquire an IP address.  After further analysis, problems were either caused by older upstream tooling or simple adjustments required in the cloud image to match the vSphere environment.  Specifically:

• Some storage vendors need StreamOptimized image format.
• Guest Images are attempting to write boot log to ttyS0, but the serial interface is not available on the VM.
• Defects in earlier versions of the qemu-img tool while creating streamOptimized images.
• DHCP binding failure caused by Predictive Network Interface Naming.

Read the entire article here, VMware Integrated OpenStack Glance Image Best Practices – OpenStack Blog for VMware

via the fine folks at VMware!