NEWS: Added support for opensuse Leap 15.3 and SLES 15 SP3!
This is a project born with the idea of installing VMs in an automated fashion for personal labs use at work on libvirt/KVM platforms, it's experimental and developed with a "learn by doing" attitude.
I am aware that there are excellent tools out there like terraform or pulumi for instance, which are probably more suited for daily enterprise usage, however, since I am familiar with ansible and kiwi I have decided to use these in order to keep the stack as simple as possible with a minimum amount of dependencies.
The project is constantly under development and subject to changes, the support for Azure is in the pipeline and under evaluation to be added in the future in a form of an Ansible role
Contributors are warmly welcomed :)
As mentioned, Kwinble is mainly composed by 2 tools:
- Kiwi-ng a powerful open source appliance builder capable of creating Linux images in a variety of formats such as Qcow2, raw, vmdk/vmx, just to name a few
- Ansible a popular open source configuration managemenet tool appreciated for its simplicity and its modular design which allows the intergation with tons of technologies from public cloud to baremetal and all in between.
The project consists of a 2 steps process:
- the build of a GNU/Linux OS image from scratch using kiwi
- the boot and the automated configuration of 1 or multiple instances using preconfigured Ansible roles
Once an image has been created can be reused for other Ansible executions, does not have to be built every time.
The idea is to give the user full flexibility and control from the build stage, where he/she can decide how the initial image should look like and what should contain, to the actual final running VM.
Kwinble is essentially a GNU/Linux factory inside the project folder.
I am using openSUSE Leap 15.2 here so the steps shown are referring to this install, however, the same software can be retrieved and easily installed in a similar way using other GNU/Linux distributions.
kiwi version used for this project: 9.23.49
Kiwi installed by adding the kiwi repo to leap 15.2:
sudo zypper ar https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Virtualization:/Appliances:/Builder/openSUSE_Leap_15.2/ kiwi-leap152
sudo zypper ref && sudo zypper in python3-kiwi
A recent Ansible LTSS version:
ansible => 2.9.21 (preferable the one i use)
In my case the one provided by the leap 15.2 repo has been used
sudo zypper in ansible
on Leap 15.2 install KVM patterns:
sudo zypper install -t pattern kvm_server kvm_tools
-
Arp-scan is used for IP discovery and is going to be installed automatically if not present by Ansible during the first run.
-
Make sure the local user is added to the libvirt group
usermod -aG libvirt <username> -
Configure your local or global
ansible.cfgto skip the ssh fingerprint host check:
host_key_checking = False
git clone https://github.com/gnuninu/kwinble
cd kwinble
The aim here is to build QCOW images with a small footprint so Ansible can take over, boot the image and finish the OS/App configuration according to the selected ansible roles defined in the main playbooks.
Kiwi is a very powerful tool, for full info visit kiwi website and read the detailed documentation, the following steps are only meant for a quick start and by no means as a replacement of the official documentation.
NOTE: The KIWI templates used to build Leap are fetched from openSUSE JeOS project and then customised: https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/openSUSE:Leap:15.2:Images/kiwi-templates-JeOS/JeOS.kiwi?expand=1
cd jeos_template/opensuse-leap-153
Edit JeOS.kiwi and config.sh as needed if you want to modify the default settings
The package kiwi-templates-JeOS provides the templates for SLES and it's availbale in the sle-module-development-tools channel module
In order to build SUSE Enterprise Linux a subscription is necessary to access the online repositories through SCC and to be able to download a media ISO
Once a media is retrieved, it can be mounted locally, for example:
mkdir -p /mnt/sles-iso/sles153
sudo mount -o loop SLE-15-SP3-Full-x86_64-GM-Media1.iso /mnt/sles-iso/sles153
Enable the installation server (HTTP) keeping the default settings using yast:
yast instserver
Name: sles153
Directory: /srv/install
then create a symbolic link to the local installation server directory:
sudo ln -s /mnt/sles-iso/sles153 /srv/install/
Disable the firewall or make sure localhost:80 port is open
The resulting locally served directory can be configured in the repository section of kiwi in this way:
<repository type="rpm-md" alias="product-sles153" imageinclude="true"> <source path='http://127.0.0.1/sles153/Product-SLES'/> </repository>
cd jeos_template/sles153/
Edit JeOS.kiwi and config.sh as needed if you want to modify the default config
cd jeos_template/opensuse-leap-153
sudo kiwi-ng --profile=kvm-and-xen system build --description . --target-dir .
cd jeos_template/sles153/
sudo kiwi-ng --profile=kvm-and-xen system build --description . --target-dir .
The type of installations are controlled by a variable that needs to be passed to ansible.
The following types are available and mapped to the dictionaries predefined in the libvirt role here: roles/libvirt/defaults/main.yml
| os_install var | Description |
|---|---|
| sles152multi | 3 sles 15 SP2 instances |
| sles152 | 1 sles 15 SP2 instances |
| sles153multi | 3 sles 15 SP3 instances |
| sles153 | 1 sles 15 SP3 instances |
| leap152multi | 2 leap 15.2 instances |
| leap152 | 1 leap 15.2 instance |
| leap153multi | 2 leap 15.3 instances |
| leap153 | 1 leap 15.3 instance |
The number of instances can be added or removed by modifying the yaml file and/or reused as templates
IMPORTANT the images will be installed in the default storage pool which is configured by default to use the path /var/lib/libvirt/images and the NICS will be assigned to the default KVM network configured with NAT (192.168.122.0/24).
The libvirt templates are stored in roles/libvirt/templates/ and they can be customised as needed (for example if you want to add multiple NICs).
NOTE: Before deploying SLES make sure the variable SCC_RC is populated with your Registation Code available from SUSE Customer Center, do so by editing the file variables.yml
Move into the kwinble root folder.
To deploy on libvirt/kvm we need to populate the os_install varibale using the --extra-vars option, in this case we choose leap153 (1 Instance):
ansible-playbook create_kvm_vms.yml --extra-vars "os_install=leap153" -K -k -u $USER
when prompted type the root password set previously by kiwi during the image build which by default is: linux, then your user sudo password
To remove the VMs installation run ansible using the same os_install variable but this time invoking remove_kvm_vms.yml playbook:
ansible-playbook remove_kvm_vms.yml --extra-vars "os_install=leap153" -K -u $USER
Local storage and static IP DHCP mappings will be deleted as well
- users custom role
- Uyuni/SUMA role (multi disks)
- HA Clusters role (multi disks)
- Azure support
- other Linux distro support (Debian, CentOS/Almalinux...)
References: