There are several pre-built images for OpenStack available from various sources. You can download such images and use them to get familiar with OpenStack.
For any production deployment, you may like to have the ability to bundle custom images, with a custom set of applications or configuration. This chapter will guide you through the process of creating Linux images of popular distributions from scratch. We have also covered an approach to bundling Windows images.
There are some minor differences in the way you would bundle a Linux image, based on the distribution. Ubuntu makes it very easy by providing cloud-init package, which can be used to take care of the instance configuration at the time of launch. cloud-init handles importing ssh keys for password-less login, setting host name etc. The instance acquires the instance specific configuration from Nova-compute by connecting to a meta data interface running on 169.254.169.254.
While creating the image of a distro that does not have cloud-init or an equivalent package, you may need to take care of importing the keys etc. by running a set of commands at boot time from rc.local.
The process used for creating the Linux images of different distributions is largely the same with a few minor differences, which is explained below.
In all the cases, the documentation below assumes that you have a working KVM installation to use for creating the images. We are using the machine called 'client1' as explained in the chapter on "Installation and Configuration" for this purpose.
The approach explained below will generate disk images that represent a disk without any partitions.
