This page is meant to describe ways to prepare a Debian VM image ready to be used to deploy VM instances in OpenNebula.

Principles

The first step needed is to install a Debian system onto a system image which will be later run with the virtualizer of OpenNebula, typically kvm.

The easiest way to do this is to perform a Debian install inside qemu/kvm on a machine which may not be the OpenNebula execution host.

Attention : if the target is supposed to run a i686 VM, be careful to install from an i386 installer, and likewise for amd64.

After installation, the system will need to be personalized to include some scripts needed by OpenNebula. These scripts are executed upon boot, and to the contextualization of the VM : when OpenNebula deploys a VM, it will boot its image providing it with an iso9660 CD image which it will have prepared so that it contains a context definition file. The personalization you'll add to the VM image is the means to load that context file upon boot.

Howtos

Preparing a Debian stable/squeeze amd64 image

Customize the booted image to add contextualization boot scripts

Note: the following assumes that you want to proceed to Generic Contextualization (as opposed to another mechanism proposed in OpenNebula, see the docs above).

You may now shutdown the VM, and copy its .img file to the OpenNebula monitor host, and create an image that will be registered in the available images for VM instanciation.

See OpenNebula/PreparingDebianVmTemplate for hints on how to prepare the Debian VM template that will be booted off the image.