Boxgrinder OVFCatalog

Using Boxgrinder to build and upload appliances to the Abiquo OVFCatalog

This tutorial will guide you to create an Ubuntu Oneiric appliance using Boxgrinder and upload it to the Abiquo OVFCatalog (PlayRepo) service.

WARNNG OVFCatalog is a brand new 2.0 service, not yet released.

Pre-requisites

You need an Ubuntu based Boxgrinder meta-appliance (used to build other appliances). Get it from:

http://mirror.abiquo.com/appliances/boxgrinder-meta-ubuntu-oneiric-amd64.vmdk

and deploy it.

Install the Boxgrinder ovfcatalog-delivery-plugin to the meta-appliance

SSH to the boxgrinder meta-appliance. Default password for the root user is 'boxgrinder'.

$ ssh root@my-boxgrinder-meta-app

Install required packages:

$ apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev build-essential git

Install the plugin

$ gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc boxgrinder-ovfcatalog-delivery-plugin

Download sample appliance definitions

You can download some Ubuntu based Boxgrinder appliance definitions from here. Let's check them out using git:

$ git clone http://github.com/rubiojr/boxgrinder-appliances

We’ll use a Ubuntu appliance definition to generate a new appliance:

$ cd boxgrinder-appliances/ubuntu-jeos

$ boxgrinder-build -l boxgrinder-ubuntu-plugin,ovfcatalog-plugin \
                           -d ovfcatalog \
                           --delivery-config host:rs.bcn.abiquo.com,port:9000 \
                           oneiric.appl

This will build the Ubuntu Oneiric appliance and upload it to the OVFCatalog service installed in 'rs.bcn.abiquo.com' and listening on port '9000'.

Browse the OVFCatalog and you'll see a new appliance named 'ubuntu-oneiric' in QCOW2 format.

#OVFCatalog plugin configuration parameters

The ovfcatalog Boxgrinder plugin accepts the following list of config parameters:

host: the OVFCatalog host. port: the OVFCatalog port. category: the OVFCatalog category the appliance will have. icon_path: the URL of the appliance icon. host: the OVFCatalog host name: the appliance name. description: the appliance description. ram: the amount of RAM the appliance will have. cpu: the number of CPUs the appliance will have.

All the config parameters have default values and none of them are mandatory. Use the --delivery-config Boxgrinder parameter to configure the appliance upload to fit your needs.