imagetools

Tools for creating SmartOS images.

Creating seed images

Seed images are the absolute baseline of a SmartOS image. They are created from files produced by a smartos-live build, containing the original /etc, /var and SMF manifest database.

First, you need to perform a smartos-live build, as described in the wiki page:

http://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Building+SmartOS+on+SmartOS

For this example we are building the release-20141030 tag, in order to produce a seed-20141030 image off that baseline.

Then from the global zone:

$ ./create-seed /path/to/smartos-live seed-20141030

This will create a zones/seed-20141030 file system containing the seed files.

Once you have a seed file system ready, use create-image to turn it into a provisionable image and manifest.

$ ./create-image seed-20141030 seed-20141030

This will use /zones/seed-20141030, snapshot it, and create a file system image along with a manifest file ready for importing with imgadm.

Once complete it will output an imgadm command you can use, e.g.

Done.  Now run this to install the image:

  imgadm install -m ./output/seed-20141030.json -f ./output/seed-20141030.zfs.gz

If that's successful you can cleanup the temporary dataset:

$ zfs destroy zones/seed-20141030

You can then use the UUID as input for the next phase.

Creating base images

Base images are comprised of a baseline seed image, plus an applied overlay appropriate for the target image. You use the install-image tool to copy the overlay files into a specified zone and then execute the customize script.

Start by creating a basic zone based on the seed image created above (replacing image_uuid with the uuid of the seed image):

$ vmadm create <<EOF
{
  "brand": "joyent",
  "image_uuid": "1e9e46ec-e4e5-11e4-9bdb-1788911817ce",
  "max_physical_memory": 512,
  "alias": "seed-zone",
  "nics": [
    {
      "nic_tag": "admin",
      "ip": "dhcp"
    }
  ]
}
EOF
Successfully created VM c374c4bc-2395-4848-b28d-0c18937e7775

Then we can apply the 2014Q4-i386 configuration to the VM with:

$ ./install-base -c 2014Q4-i386 -n base-32-lts -r 14.4.0 -z c374c4bc-2395-4848-b28d-0c18937e7775

This uses the 2014Q4-i386 configuration, sets the version number to 14.4.0 and installs to the specified zone.

The final part of this script runs sm-prepare-image which does some final image cleanup and shutdown, after which you can simply generate the finished image, again with create-image:

$ ./create-image base-32-lts-14.4.0 c374c4bc-2395-4848-b28d-0c18937e7775

This final image and manifest should now be suitable for production use.