Using Ubuntu cloud images in KVM

Mon 16 July 2012 by Thejaswi Puthraya

Cross posted from work blog.

Quite a few of our clients are powered by Amazon EC2 or Rackspace and we use Ubuntu LTS releases for our servers. Canonical provides EC2 AMIs and Openstack images for all their releases. By using these JeOS images on the server as well as on the development platform reduces the dev/prod parity which we discussed in a previous post.

In this post, we'll see how to setup the Ubuntu cloud images in the local KVM hypervisor. Unlike the previous post, we'll use only the virt-manager to do the initial provisioning but you can be assured that there is a command line way to do all of the same.

Head over to Ubuntu cloud images and select the appropriate release (or daily build). At the time of writing the article, 12.04 is the latest LTS release and can be downloaded from here. I have downloaded the 64-bit (or amd64) images (ubuntu-12.04-server-cloudimg-amd64-root.tar.gz) since I use a 64-bit machine for my development and the servers are all 64-bit file. This compressed file contains a virtual hard disk, virtual floppy disk and a kernel.

Let us now use this virtual hard disk as a base for our images and create new guest VM based on this disk.:

$ qemu-img create -b ubuntu-12.04-server-cloudimg-amd64.img -f qcow2 new_vm.img

The qemu-img command creates a new_vm.img image with qcow2 format using the ubuntu-12.04-server-cloudimg-amd64.img as the backing image.

Right click on the connection in virt-manager and select New and provide a name for the new virtual machine and select the Import existing disk image option. In the next step, provide the path of the image just created (ie new_vm.img) and optionally select the OS type and version. In the third step, select the RAM allocated to the VM and the number of cores and in the final step check the Customize configuration before install before filling other options.

In the Customization screen, click on the section that says Disk 1 and set the storage format to qcow2 and apply the changes.

Now all that is left is to set the boot order and there are two methods:

Using the floppy disk image
Using cloud-init on the hard disk image

Using the floppy disk for booting

If you don't see a floppy disk in the list of devices in the customization screen, click on Add Hardware and add a new Storage device of type Floppy disk and check the Select managed or other existing storage and provide the path to the floppy disk image from the download and set the Storage format to raw.

Select the Boot Options section in the customization screen after creating the floppy disk and select the Floppy in the Boot device order. Start the installation and after that run the VM and you are done!

After booting the new VM, you should see the GRUB screen in a few seconds as below.

Choose the option that you prefer and you will be redirected to the login prompt after the bootup.

This method is useful if you have a provisioning or a metadata service like Orchestra or Cobbler though not a compulsion.

Using cloud-init on the hard disk

CloudInit is an init script that performs some basic configuration and house keeping tasks on guest VMs like setting the hostname, generating SSH keys etc

Go to the Boot Options section and select the Hard disk from the Boot device order and change the Direct kernel boot sub section.

Provide the kernel file (the file ending with vmlinuz-virtual) from the download in the Kernel path and the following values in the Kernel arguments:

ro init=/usr/lib/cloud-init/uncloud-init root=/dev/vda ds=nocloud ubuntu-pass=initialpassword

Start the installation and in a few moments you have a brand new guest VM.

You now have exactly the same packages as an official and freshAmazon AMI or Rackspace image and so you don't have to break your head worrying about the dependency hell and enjoy more time developing.