Create user images for the Bare Metal service

Bare Metal provisioning requires two sets of images: the deploy images and the user images. The deploy images are used by the Bare Metal service to prepare the bare metal server for actual OS deployment. Whereas the user images are installed on the bare metal server to be used by the end user. There are two types of user images:

partition images

contain only the contents of the root partition. Additionally, two more images are used together with them: an image with a kernel and with an initramfs.

Warning

To use partition images with local boot, Grub2 must be installed on them.

whole disk images

contain a complete partition table with one or more partitions.

Warning

The kernel/initramfs pair must not be used with whole disk images, otherwise they’ll be mistaken for partition images.

Building user images

The disk-image-builder can be used to create user images required for deployment and the actual OS which the user is going to run.

• Install diskimage-builder package (use virtualenv, if you don’t want to install anything globally):

  # pip install diskimage-builder
  

• Build the image your users will run (Ubuntu image has been taken as an example):

  • Partition images

    $ disk-image-create ubuntu baremetal dhcp-all-interfaces grub2 -o my-image
    

  • Whole disk images

    $ disk-image-create ubuntu vm dhcp-all-interfaces -o my-image
    

The partition image command creates my-image.qcow2, my-image.vmlinuz and my-image.initrd files. The grub2 element in the partition image creation command is only needed if local boot will be used to deploy my-image.qcow2, otherwise the images my-image.vmlinuz and my-image.initrd will be used for PXE booting after deploying the bare metal with my-image.qcow2. For whole disk images only the main image is used.

If you want to use Fedora image, replace ubuntu with fedora in the chosen command.