RHEL 7 Packer Template for MAAS

Introduction

The Packer template in this directory creates a RHEL 7 AMD64 image for use with MAAS.

Prerequisites (to create the image)

• A machine running Ubuntu 18.04+ with the ability to run KVM virtual machines.
• qemu-utils
• Packer, v1.7.0 or newer
• The RHEL 7 DVD ISO

Requirements (to deploy the image)

• MAAS 2.3+
• Curtin 18.1-59+

Customizing the Image

The deployment image may be customized by modifying http/rhel7.ks. See the CentOS kickstart documentation for more information.

Building the image using a proxy

The Packer template pulls all packages from the DVD except for Canonical's cloud-init repository. To use a proxy during the installation add the --proxy=$HTTP_PROXY flag to every line starting with url or repo in http/rhel7.ks. Alternatively you may set the --mirrorlist values to a local mirror.

Building an image

You can easily build the image using the Makefile:

$ make ISO=/PATH/TO/rhel-server-7.9-x86_64-dvd.iso

Alternatively you can manually run packer. Your current working directory must be in packer-maas/rhel7, where this file is located. Once in packer-maas/rhel7 you can generate an image with:

$ sudo packer init
$ sudo PACKER_LOG=1 packer build -var 'rhel7_iso_path=/PATH/TO/rhel-server-7.9-x86_64-dvd.iso' rhel7.pkr.hcl

Note: rhel7.pkr.hcl is configured to run Packer in headless mode. Only Packer output will be seen. If you wish to see the installation output connect to the VNC port given in the Packer output or change the value of headless to false in rhel7.pkr.hcl.

Installation is non-interactive.

Uploading an image to MAAS

$ maas $PROFILE boot-resources create
name='rhel/7-custom' title='RHEL 7 Custom' architecture='amd64/generic' filetype='tgz' content@=rhel7.tar.gz

Default Username

The default username is cloud-user