User should be able to export/use local zone image

[sax]

After doing some configuration of a zone, the user should be able to export that zone as a base image, into the local file system.

When provisioning a new zone, the user should then be able to use the zones from the local file system.

[sax]

This might need to run a local http server in the host operating system in order to serve the image metadata as well as to allow the global zone to import the image.

[sax]

This depends on managing zfs snapshots, an ability which I just added to the plugin.

[bixu]

Oh wow, this is cool.

[sax]

Yeah. Now that we're using test kitchen, the fact that we have to install build-essential and chef every time adds minutes to each kitchen test. I want to be able to build local images.

[sax]

What would you say to having image overrides? Like bundler local gem overrides, where if a particular image is used, the plugin swaps out a local one.

This would allow you to check in a Vagrantfile or .kitchen.yml with a public image, but then run vagrant with a modified image from the host system.

[bixu]

That seems reasonable.

bixu.co

On 09 Dec 2014, at 16:40, Eric Saxby [email protected] wrote:

What would you say to having image overrides? Like bundler local gem overrides, where if a particular image is used, the plugin swaps out a local one.

This would allow you to check in a Vagrantfile or .kitchen.yml with a public image, but then run vagrant with a modified image from the host system.

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[bixu]

Drop me a direct line when you have achieved this? I can think of some reasons we'd want to use custom images at $job, and we will have a private SDC install soon, too.

[sax]

Will do. This is going to be a bit of work, but I'll be incrementally
adding bits and pieces of it on master over the next few weeks.

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 1:15 AM, Blake Irvin [email protected]
wrote:

Drop me a direct line when you have achieved this? I can think of some
reasons we'd want to use custom images at $job, and we will have a private
SDC install soon, too.

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#26 (comment)
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[sax]

Another thing this will be nice for is to download a zone image onto the host once, then install it into a VM from a local image server. It'll make it faster/easier to work with multiple images without having to create new base boxes.

[sax]

Next to do: after downloading the compressed image, we need to created a manifest file.

For reference: https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Managing+Images

[bixu]

A big +1 to this. Local Vagrant-powered Test Kitchen is about 2x slower against SmartOS LX than against Ubuntu native just because of bit sucking. I would love to work on this, but my time is pretty limited right now. If want to try a remote pair on a Friday night I might be able to swing it.

[sax]

I'm in the same boat. I really want this feature, but am only going to have little bits of time here or there to get it working.

[bixu]

I'm hoping to get to a place at $job where it's again reasonable for me to take hack-days. If so, maybe I can fast-track this a little. Test Kitchen/ServerSpec is life to me these days :)

[sax]

I just finished up and pushed the last bit of code for this to work. @bixu want to try it out and see if you run into any problems? I released 0.2.0 to rubygems.

[sax]

One update I need to do is to change local datasets from bzip2 to gzip. They will be around 15% larger, but a lot faster to unzip when starting up new zones.

[bixu]

I have this at the top of our NFR/Ops backlog - will get back to you as soon as we've tested

[bixu]

Is this supposed to be fully-automted by version 2 of the plugin or do I need to set up the local image server myself? A quick look this morning and it doesn't seem to be faster than the previous version of the plugin, although I'm doing a kitchen test with a SmartOS configuration I had used yesterday.

[sax]

You don't need to set up an image server... it uses rsync to get the local image into the global zone... that's not as fast as I was expecting, but for me it's still a bit faster than installing all of build-essentials from scratch every time I run test-kitchen.

https://github.com/vagrant-smartos/vagrant-smartos-zones/blob/master/lib/vagrant/smartos/zones/util/rsync.rb