#veewee

I maintain a Gentoo Vagrant box that you can pull from cmiles/gentoo-amd64-minimal. It is produced using Veewee and the gentoo-latest template.

This article describes how you can produce your own Gentoo box using Veewee. It assumes you have Veewee installed. If you don't have Veewee installed, refer to Veewee installation for how.

Set the name of your box in a variable.

You will need to refer to the name of your in a few commands so it's easiest to put this in a variable. I like to include the date of latest Stage 3 in the box name.

export VBOX=gentoo-20150402-amd64

Create the Veewee definition from gentoo-latest.

This step copies files from templates/gentoo-latest to definitions/gentoo-20150402-amd64.

veewee vbox define $VBOX gentoo-latest

Customise the definition for your box.

You are now free edit the configurations and scripts in the definitions/gentoo-20150402-amd64 folder.

The first thing you may want to do is change the definition variation YML file loaded in the definition.rb file for your architecture and for if you want a minimal box or a box with the works.

Open definitions/gentoo-20150402-amd64/definition.rb and change the definitionVariable value to one of the following:

gentoo_amd64.yml – Choose this if you need AMD64 architecture and you want Chef, Puppet and Ruby pre-installed and USB support.

gentoo_x86.yml – Choose this if you need x86 architecture and you want Chef, Puppet, and Ruby pre-installed and USB support.

gentoo_amd64_minimal.yml – The same as gentoo_amd64.yml but without Chef, Puppet, Ruby and USB support.

gentoo_x86_minimal.yml – The same as gentoo_x86.yml but without Chef, Puppet, Ruby and USB support.

Note that the resulting box size between a minimal and regular configuration is not significant. It's only about 30MB.

You may also wish to edit the values in settings_amd64.sh or settings_x86.sh, which contain settings for the kernel version, locale, timezone, etc. And the kernel configuration can be found in kernel.sh.

Build the virtual machine.

With all your customisations to the definition in place, we can now execute the command to build the virtual machine.

veewee vbox build $VBOX

This will take as long as you would expect to install Gentoo into a virtual machines.

Validate your new virtual machine.

When the build is complete you may like to validate that everything you need is installed.

veewee vbox validate $VBOX

If you used a minimal configuration, you can expect the checks for Ruby, Chef and Puppet to fail. Note also, the check for password-less sudo access check may fail even though it is good.

Export your virtual machine to a box file.

When you are happy with the resulting virtual machine, you can then export it to box file for use with Vagrant.

veewee vbox export $VBOX

You now have a Gentoo box you can distribute for use with Vagrant.

Final Thoughts

It can be beneficial to reproduce a new Gentoo box regularly.

With the Portage tree constantly changing, having a base box that is old can cause it to take a long time to provision if your Vagrant provisioning method updates world.

Scripts for provisioning a Vagrant environment can also start to misbehave when dependencies change.

I find it best to build a new box, and then proceed to update my provisioning scripts.

Appliance

Travailler avec des machines virtuelles est devenu une chose habituelle dans notre profession. On prend facilement l'habitude de télécharger une "appliance" pour tester une nouvelle application ou pour mettre en œuvre un prototype.

Je propose régulièrement cette solution à mes clients. Pourtant il est difficile de maintenir une machine virtuelle à jour. Les distributions changent tous les 6 mois et les applications aussi, il est fréquent de perdre plusieurs heures pour ré-installer une VM, surtout si on n'est pas un expert Linux.

L'installation et la configuration de la GED Alfresco est un exemple intéressant. Il est possible d'utiliser l'installeur Alfresco mais il impose une organisation qui n'est pas conforme à l'esprit de Linux, difficile à mettre à jour et pas toujours conforme avec les procédures de sauvegarde utilisées.

UPDATE:  For a better alternative to Veewee and Packer, click here

Vagrant

Most developers and ops people are familiar with Vagrant, the little tool for launching local virtual machines. I use Vagrant daily, for testing Ansible scripts. I like the idea of booting a VM, running some tests, and then destroying once I realize I completely messed up.

Vagrant is nice. It solves a huge pain for many of us.

Unfortunately, there are two problems associated with using Vagrant.

First: most public Vagrant boxes shouldn't be trusted. They are often old/outdated, contain unknown packages and software, and are built by random people you might or might not want building boxes for you.

The boxes work, of course, but any serious person wouldn't dare use them for production servers.

Secondly: Vagrant boxes are not customized for you. You get the partition scheme dictated by its creator, you often get Chef and/or Puppet, and you get useless bloat packages that you may not want.

That leads us to the following tools:

Veewee and Packer

These tools serve a different function. They are generally used by people who want a more customized operating system. They are used by people who want full control of their virtual machine. They are used by people who don't trust public boxes built by some anonymous person without any details of the installation process.

Having contributed code to Veewee, I want to continue supporting its development, and I love that it's written in Ruby, a simple language for which many developers are available for hire in Japan. I can't say the same for Go Lang just yet.

The main problem I've noticed, as did EVERYONE who's used Veewee or Packer for the first time, is that it's SO SLOW!

Unless you have a big powerful computer, and a solid idea of what you're trying to do, you'll likely spend at least a few hours and probably a few days messing with these tools to get the "perfect virtual machine" setup. Not including the time it takes to install all the dependencies.

What about updates? Do you repeat the process manually in 2 weeks when there's a security update? Do you remember how to do it? Or will you spend another 2 or 3 days trying to figure it all out? How can you make it faster? What if you want to install a very customized virtual machine 50 times a day? Are you able to do that? Can you generate a perfect Vagrant box from your virtual machine? an OVA with the proper OVF and additional metadata? Does your virtual machine run on other platforms such as VMware, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM? Do you even have terabytes of disk space for storing so many ISOs and virtual machine images?

Of course, these might seem like extreme use-cases, but I know some people actually have this problem.

That's where we come in.

Jidoteki

Before Jidoteki, we had those problems listed above. Instead of waiting thirty minutes for each virtual machine installation, we got the most ridiculously high spec servers to do it for us. THREE MINUTES. That's how fast we can install a fully customized operating system from scratch.

We're not even joking.

So naturally, after solving the speed issue, we attacked all the other issues around using public Vagrant boxes, supporting multiple hypervisors, and creating boxes in different formats.

Not only that, but we also realized that companies can use Jidoteki to make more money. We want you to be more profitable. We will help you scale your business's sales automatically. If you use Jidoteki to build your virtual machines, you're not only saving a ton of time, but you're creating a new channel to sell your software or web service. You can use us to launch 50 installations per day, each customized for your customers, or each having different updates or packages or whatever you can think of.