Nectar Virtual Desktop images

This project includes scripts to build a Virtual Desktop images suitable for use with the ARDC Nectar Bumblebee service.

We have:

• Packer JSON config for building the image on the Nectar Research Cloud.
• Ansible roles for provisioning software, including the desktop GUI
• Vagrant config for building and testing the image build process locally.

The images are built on top of the existing image building tools from the Nectar Images project.

We overload the image_source field in the Packer config to specifiy an image name, which will be resolved to the actual image ID. This functionality is not supported in Packer, so we do it as part of our build scripts.

This repository will be mostly used for automated image building jobs on the Nectar CI server, but we do support building images by hand, which can be especially useful for testing.

Requirements

You'll require the following tools installed and in your path

• Packer
• Ansible
• Vagrant (for testing)
• OpenStack CLI
• jq (JSON CLI tool)
• QEMU tools (for image shrinking process)

OpenStack and Ansible integrations for Packer need to be installed too. This can be done with:

packer plugins install github.com/hashicorp/openstack
packer plugins install github.com/hashicorp/ansible

Ensure there is a security group named "image-build" in the Nectar project that is associated with the OpenStack RC file. The security group should have a rule allowing SSH traffic, so the playbook can communicate with it.

(This is pretty much the same set of requirements as for the nectar-images repo, so check there ... and the ImageBuilding Wiki page ... for updates, clarifications, etc.)

Building the image

1. Make sure all the required software (listed above) is installed
2. Load your Nectar RC credentials into your environment
3. cd to the directory containing this README.md file
4. Check that the git repo is up to date
5. Check that ./packer-ssh-key has permissions 600.
6. Run the build script

./build_local.sh <image>.json

The script uses packer to build the requested image in a Nectar VM. Then it downloads the snapshot from Glance, shrinks it, re-uploads it, sets its properties and finally creates the bootable master volume for Bumblebee.

Testing the image with Vagrant

We include a Vagrantfile which can be used for testing the provisioning process with Ansible and test the resulting image.

Run vagrant status in the top level directory for a list of available virtual machine profiles you can test.

To launch a test Vagrant instance, use the following command:

$ vagrant up --no-destroy-on-error

The Vagrant config prefers the libvirt backend, which is ideal for Linux machines but you'll need to set it up yourself and support non-root access. The virtualbox provider is also enabled if you'd prefer to use that.

You can set the provider manually on the command line using the provder argument. For example:

$ vagrant up --provider virtualbox