Build Golden Images For Your Openshift Virtualization Cloud Using RHEL Image Builder

In this demo, I’d like to share the way you could create your custom golden image, based on RHEL 8.5 operating system, and publish it to Openshift Virtualization so that your customers will be able to use custom templates.

First, we’ll use the RHEL Image Builder utility in order to create a custom qcow2 image with pre-defined users, packages, hostnames, etc.

Then, we’ll publish the image to Openshift Virtualization as a Data Volume, that will be used by a created template.

When the template is ready, we’ll deploy a VM from that template and make sure all of our wanted configurations are valid.

Let the game begin!

Prerequisites

• An Installed Openshift Cluster (4.10)
• An Installed Openshift Virtualization Operator (4.10)
• An RHEL server to compose & Upload images

Compose Your Custom RHEL8.5 QCOW2 Image

Let’s first install all the needed utilities for composing the wanted rhel8.5 image:

$ yum install -y lorax-composer composer-cli

Now, we’ll enable the needed services for the composition process to work properly:

$ systemctl enable --now osbuild-composer.socket && systemctl start --now osbuild-composer.socket

Let’s take a look at the .toml file that is used as the blueprint for the rhel8.5 custom image that we want to build:

name = "rhel8.5-devops-tools"
description = "This image is used for developers searching for pre-build DevOps ariented rhel8.5 os"
version = "0.0.1"
modules = []
groups = []
distro = ""
[[packages]]
name = "wget"
version = "*"
[[packages]]
name = "git"
version = "*"
[customizations]
hostname = "rhel8"
[[customizations.user]]
name = "spaz"
description = "spaz"
password = "$6$pJXZ3nD7NbAXr2A8$.Mv9dKlxBoihmeSpTjpt61zuA0X9GCUZu/Wb/jRvJKpzgCb7IliVx7Pr6GTKa3zL6s3zl30SkbzZo5vWZkJCz/"
key = "ssh-rsa ..."
groups = ["wheel"]

We can see that using the blueprint .toml file, we can give the blueprint a name, give it a version to control differences, install packages, create users with SSH keys and passwords, and provide a hostname.

Now let’s push the blueprint so that we’ll be able to start the composition process. Pushing the blueprint config preserves the configuration version:

$ composer-cli blueprints push rhel8.5-devops-tools.toml

If you want to see if the config was applied properly, you can use the following command:

$ composer-cli blueprints show rhel8.5-devops-tools
name = "rhel8.5-devops-tools"
description = "This image is used for developers searching for pre-build DevOps ariented rhel8.5 os"
version = "0.0.1"
modules = []
groups = []
distro = ""
.
.
.

Now let’s start the composition process, and save the composed image in qcow2 format, so that we'll be able to use in in Openshift Virtualization:

$ composer-cli compose start rhel8.5-devops-tools qcow2
Compose ecad14a5-1123-4e10-9edf-172152495eb2 added to the queue

When the composition process finishes, you could verify that it has been completed properly:

$ composer-cli compose status 
c7d6247c-70a7-4bea-90aa-61a647ffacbe FINISHED Wed Jun 1 05:05:30 2022 rhel8.5-devops-tools 0.0.1 qcow2            10737418240

Now, we have the image ready in a qcow2 format, let's download it so we could upload it as a Data Volume for our customized VM:

$ composer-cli compose image c7d6247c-70a7-4bea-90aa-61a647ffacbe
c7d6247c-70a7-4bea-90aa-61a647ffacbe-disk.qcow2

Now let’s verify that is was written to our local filesystem in the current directory we are in:

$ ll -h *.qcow2
-rw------- 1 root root 784M Jun  1 05:07 c7d6247c-70a7-4bea-90aa-61a647ffacbe-disk.qcow2

Great! now let’s deal with uploading this image to Openshift Virtualization.

Upload Your QCOW2 Image As Data Volume

In order to upload this qcow2 image as a Data Volume, we'll have to use the virtctl CLI that interacts with Openshift Virtualization's API, You could download it from the following link in your cluster that hosts the operator:

$ wget https://hyperconverged-cluster-cli-download-openshift-cnv.apps.<cluster_name>.<domain>/amd64/linux/virtctl.tar.gz --no-check-certificate

Now let’s use the utility to upload this image:

$ virtctl image-upload dv rhel8.5-devops-tools --size=20G --image-path=c7d6247c-70a7-4bea-90aa-61a647ffacbe-disk.qcow2 --insecure
PVC test-vms/rhel8.5-devops-tools not found 
DataVolume test-vms/rhel8.5-devops-tools created
Waiting for PVC rhel8.5-devops-tools upload pod to be ready...
Pod now ready
Uploading data to https://cdi-uploadproxy-openshift-cnv.apps.ocp.spaz.local
 783.62 MiB / 783.62 MiB [=========================================================================================================] 100.00% 3m19s
Uploading data completed successfully, waiting for processing to complete, you can hit ctrl-c without interrupting the progress
Processing completed successfully
Uploading c7d6247c-70a7-4bea-90aa-61a647ffacbe-disk.qcow2 completed successfully

Make sure that the Data Volume exists and is available to use:

$ oc get dv | grep rhel8.5-devops-tools
rhel8.5-devops-tools                          Succeeded   N/A                   13m

Now, let’s create a VM template using that Data Volume. When starting up the VM, it’ll use the provided Data Volume as the boot volume for the VM, with all the install packages that we’ve asked for:

Verify that the template was successfully created:

$ oc get template
NAME                   DESCRIPTION   PARAMETERS    OBJECTS
rhel8.5-devops-tools                 2 (1 blank)   1

Make sure that you see the template form the Developer tab in your cluster:

Now, make sure to create a VM from that template, simulating a user that tried to order a new DevOps VM as a service:

Hit the Create button and wait for the VM to finish its startup phase:

The VM is created, and SSH is fully available using a NodePort service (you can also use MetalLB if you want your VM to get its own external floating IP address).

Now, that our VM is up and running, we can verify that we can log in with the proper user, make sure that the hostname was successfully changed and that we have our packages installed:

$ ssh spaz@ocp-worker02.spaz.local -p 32725
Activate the web console with: systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket
Register this system with Red Hat Insights: insights-client --register
Create an account or view all your systems at https://red.ht/insights-dashboard
Last login: Wed Jun  1 06:19:30 2022 from 10.130.0.1
[spaz@rhel8 ~]$ which git
/usr/bin/git

Nice! We have our VM created from a template created in Openshift Virtualization, using the image that was created using the RHEL Image Builder utility.

Using these capabilities, we can make sure to create templates in an automated and secured way, to make sure that customers are using fully supported golden images for their cloud service.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this demo, See ya next time!