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Published on: 2019-03-18

Building a QEMU Template Constructor

Estimated time to read: 2 minutes

The Nutanix AHV VM format is based on QEMU. In order to build VMs for the AHV platform, you need to provision a VM with the appropriate settings.

  • Due to a bug in Red Hat, the two SCSI controller options (scsi and virtio-scsi) can't be used. Unfortunately, the default controller in Nutanix is the virtio-scsi controller.
  • The stable release of Debian doesn't have a recent enough version of QEMU associated with it, so the unstable release was used

Setup

  1. Create a Virtual Machine in VirtualBox and ensure that the settings for Nested Virtualisation are enabled Image
  2. Provision the virtual machine
  3. Confirm that virtualisation features are exposed in the VM 
    lscpu | grep Virtualization
  4. Install the core QEMU tools 
    # Debian
# Update current packages
apt update

# Install QEMU
apt install qemu qemu-kvm
  5. At this point, you should be able to create VMs
  6. Install packer 
    # Install wget
apt install -y wget

# Download packer
wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/1.3.5/packer_1.3.5_linux_amd64.zip

# Install unzip
apt install -y unzip

# Unzip packer zip file
unzip packer_1.3.5_linux_amd64.zip
  7. If you intend to build VMs with headerless mode set to false, then you will need to install a GUI. To the right is the commands to install the GNOME desktop interface 
    # Install GNOME Desktop
apt -y groups install "GNOME Desktop"

Building a Template

  1. Transfer installation media to the QEMU server
  2. Stage files for creating the template via packer on the QEMU server
  3. Run packer pointing to the json file 
    ./packer build quemu-centOS-7-base.json

  4. If successful, output similar to this will happen

    Image