DevOps - Agile / Deployment Pipeline & Continuous Delivery - What creates the VM?

[portseven]

Most of the time the base OS is from a pre created golden 'image' for the flavour of OS you want, that image can have software pre-installed on it. But the idea is that you have a base image with just the OS on it and maybe a puppet client.

And as part of the bootstrap phase of that image you will start it up and then execute a bunch of commands on first boot that makes that machine unique, e.g. get ip's, generate hostname, register with puppet master, put some ssh keys on their, and pull down the software / code you are deploying.

Look up the concept of AMI (Amazon Machine Images) alongside EC2 User Data Scripts - Running Commands on Your Linux Instance at Launch - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

** PM for Cloud Consultancy Rates ;-)

[SpontaneousOrder]

Docker is handy for this kind of thing too. You can layer on, in a plugin kind of fashion, your different features that you'd expect in your equivalent VM.

[stek]

Most of the time the base OS is from a pre created golden 'image' for the flavour of OS you want, that image can have software pre-installed on it. But the idea is that you have a base image with just the OS on it and maybe a puppet client.

And as part of the bootstrap phase of that image you will start it up and then execute a bunch of commands on first boot that makes that machine unique, e.g. get ip's, generate hostname, register with puppet master, put some ssh keys on their, and pull down the software / code you are deploying.

Look up the concept of AMI (Amazon Machine Images) alongside EC2 User Data Scripts - Running Commands on Your Linux Instance at Launch - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

** PM for Cloud Consultancy Rates ;-)

xCAT does this by (if Linux) with a customised kickstart build from pixie boot, and via set of editable pre and post scripts, allows you add the extra bits, ITM, Oracle client, GPFS, TSM client etc and whatever stuff you want to bang on top - up it comes ready to use in about 20 mins.

[portseven]

I, and current ClientCorp, use Vagrant to bring up (and take down) VMs.

+1 for Vagrant, i use it to play with VM's on my laptop, its pretty convenient for having the build described in the VagrantFile (just a text file). It builds on top on an existing VM image.

You can even use Vagrant to fire up VM's on Amazon AWS - referencing the AMI's and then any config you want on top of that.

[minestrone]

"it works on my VM"