Windows imaging process
Hi everyone, 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!
Hi everyone, 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!
On Tue, 30 Nov 2021 at 01:11, Gaël THEROND <gael.therond@bitswalk.com> wrote:
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).
Does that mean you cannot alter the original image? There are methods for inserting the virtio drivers into the installation media, but that will require generating a new installer ISO out of the modified files. This article seems to be describing the procedure correctly: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/kbs/details?targetId=kA00e000000bt...
Hi Patryk, Thanks a lot for the link and sorry for the late answer! As stated in my previous email, this is not going to work on our side of things as our security process prohibits us from modifying the Original ISO. Not that I CAN'T do it as I obviously have the hand on the whole image creation, just that if I'm not respecting the workflow those images won't pass the qualification gate. What really astonish me is that KVM is CDRom IDE HW Bus aware and able to mount multiple of them for a same instance, Nova itself knows about those specific HW bus too as you can actually specify it on the image metadata, what's really missing in my process for now is the ability to let nova spawn a VM with both ISO and VIRTIO drivers as CDRom devices. I'm really wondering why we can't specify any additional HW resources to nova at spawn time (from Horizon and CLI) except using native nova client such as instructed in here: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1225473 or did I miss something? Thanks a lot for your answer! Le mar. 30 nov. 2021 à 00:13, Patryk Jakuszew <patryk.jakuszew@gmail.com> a écrit :
On Tue, 30 Nov 2021 at 01:11, Gaël THEROND <gael.therond@bitswalk.com> wrote:
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).
Does that mean you cannot alter the original image? There are methods for inserting the virtio drivers into the installation media, but that will require generating a new installer ISO out of the modified files.
This article seems to be describing the procedure correctly:
https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/kbs/details?targetId=kA00e000000bt...
participants (2)
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Gaël THEROND
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Patryk Jakuszew