As promised let’s chat about the tools we at Coral now use in our development process. The first tool is for easy VM creation.

Veewee is a tool for easily (and repeatedly) building custom Vagrant base boxes, KVMs, and virtual machine images.

With Veewee I demo to my team how to create a VM from the OS ISO in just a few minutes.

Veewee isn’t only for Vagrant. It currently supports exporting VM images for the following providers:

• VirtualBox – exports to OVF filetype
• VMware (Fusion) – exports to OVA filetype
• KVM – exports to IMG filetype

Check Veewee on GitHub

A sample of the settings available to tuned your VMs are:

Veewee::Session.declare({
  :cpu_count => '2',
  :memory_size=> '2048',
  :disk_size => '256000',
  :disk_format => 'VDI',
  :hostiocache => 'off',
  :os_type_id => 'RedHat6_64',
  :iso_file => "CentOS-6.5-x86_64-minimal.iso",
  :iso_src => "http://yum.singlehop.com/CentOS/6.5/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.5-x86_64-minimal.iso",
  :iso_md5 => "0d9dc37b5dd4befa1c440d2174e88a87",
  :iso_download_timeout => 1000,
  :boot_wait => "10",
  :boot_cmd_sequence => [
    ' text ks=http://%IP%:%PORT%/ks.cfg'
  ],
  :kickstart_port => "7122",
  :kickstart_timeout => 10000,
  :kickstart_file => "ks.cfg",
  :ssh_login_timeout => "10000",
  :ssh_user => "veewee",
  :ssh_password => "veewee",
  :ssh_key => "",
  :ssh_host_port => "7222",
  :ssh_guest_port => "22",
  :sudo_cmd => "echo '%p'|sudo -S sh '%f'",
  :shutdown_cmd => "/sbin/halt -h -p",
   :postinstall_files => [
    "base.sh",
    "vmwaretools.sh",
    "dynmotd",
    "coral.sh",
    "cleanup.sh",
    "zerodisk.sh"
  ],
  :postinstall_timeout => 10000
})

Post-Install files and scripts

If some degree of personalization and optimization of the VMs is required you can do so calling scripts.

# Build a new VM based on Definition						
veewee fusion build jasper-centos65-minimal

 The outcome is a VM image ready to use in Vagrant, can be imported in VMware Fusion and/or ESXi