Enhancement: vmware OEM image

[olliewalsh]

A vmware OEM image that includes the vmware tools OEM partition would be useful. A vmdk is not necessarily the ideal format for all deployments.

As a workaround I'm using a bare-metal coreos-install from the ISO then afterwards mount /dev/sda6 and drop in the contents of the OEM partition that I've extracted from the vmdk image.

[marineam]

We also have an ova: http://alpha.release.core-os.net/amd64-usr/current/coreos_production_vmware_ova.ova

Between vmdk and ova that pretty much covers vmware I think. What sort of image are you looking for?

[marineam]

(the OVA should work with ESXi and all the fancier products)

[olliewalsh]

Not always :-) In one particular deployment I'm presented with a bare VM to be reconfigured - I have full admin rights on the VM, but not on the ESXi/VCenter hosting it (so I can't deploy new VMs from OVA etc..).
The bare-metal/ISO approach seems like easiest option, if only there was an OEM image for vmware.

[marineam]

Well, you can convert the vmdk to a raw disk image and write that to disk. coreos-install is just a wrapper around downloading and verifying images via gpg with a little extra to throw in a cloud config file. Not sure if your situation is common enough for us to provide both raw and vmdk images. You'll just need to do the conversion on some system that has a tool for the job like qemu-img

[olliewalsh]

Modifying the vmdk image doesn't help in this case. I have a (virtual) disk to install to. I can't easily replace that disk with a different image (I could, but it would be much more effort).

As I said in the summary - it's relatively straightforward to workaround, just need to get the files from the vmdk and onto the OEM partition...

Not sure if your situation is common enough

Yea, I was wondering that. I doubt this is a extremely rare though. E.g where bare-metal infrastructure is virtualized everyone still thinks in terms of bare-metal hosts so it's ISOs or PXE for OS installs. Maybe I'm wrong...

[mkuzmin]

vmware_image.bin.bz2 artifact with included VMware customizations would be very helpful for deploying to vSphere.
Right now we have to upload OVF-file, and then customize it. Much more robust solution would be creating a new VM from scratch, customize all hardware settings, boot from ISO, and install CoreOS to disk. HashiCorp Packer automates this procedure.

Unfortunately, calling

# coreos-install -d /dev/sda/ -V current -o vmware

fails with

/usr/bin/coreos-install: Image URL unavailable: http://stable.release.core-os.net/amd64-usr/current/coreos_production_vmware_image.bin.bz2

[mimmus]

I have same problem. Booting diskless could be useful on VMware too.

[jonaz]

We have this problem aswell. Installing coreos with coreos-install use foreman for PXE and we would like to have vmware tools in our image.

[pizzarabe]

What do we need to do, to get that? "Just" building a new image? The Installer already tries to install the image but of course there is no.

[crawford]

@pizzarabe nothing. If we decide the patch is acceptable, those images will be built as part of our release process. The install script would then just work.

[bgilbert]

We've added a new VM type, vmware_raw, which can installed with coreos-install -o vmware_raw. This should go out in the next alpha release.

[pizzarabe]

Nice, the latest alpha already got that (1312.0.0). Is there a way to build the vmware_raw Image also for the next stable release?