On one of our Openstack platforms, we maintain windows based workloads.

We currently have the following build process:

1°/- We download windows ISO image.

2°/- Use hyper-v to create a gold image that bring virtio drivers.

3°/- We upload this image on glance and publish it for our users.

4°/- Our users use packer to create their own windows custom image from our gold image.

This workflow works pretty fine, it’s simple enough and as Microsoft isn’t releasing a new major Windows every two months it’s pretty ok not having all the steps automated until now.

However, I’m wondering if there is a way to automate my first two steps using Openstack?

So far, from my early tests, I didn’t managed to get all of appropriate gears to work together, did I missed something?

I need to create a VM that at least can use the Windows ISO plus a virtio ISO as a second cdrom device and an additional user-data payload that will instruct the Windows installer to go automatically through the installation steps plus loads missing drivers from the virtio iso.

This is perfectly working on a native kvm as you can add multiple cdrom device but I didn’t find a way to replicate that on Openstack.

Starting from an unaltered Microsoft originated ISO image is a mandatory requirement for this project (Because of security constraints that I can’t have any impact on).

Help from anyone that already had to deal with such situation would be very appreciated !

Thanks!