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Creating KVM machines with BoxGrinder and VMBuilder

Virtual Building Blocks

Virtualization technologies are supposed to make life easier for the administrator, but after converting a number of servers to a few dozen VMs, what was supposed to make things easier can quickly become a burden. Tools that facilitate the process of creating new virtual machines are therefore quite useful.

The fastest and easiest way to set up a new virtual machine is by cloning. To do this, you can run the virt-clone command in the shell:

virt-clone --original userver5 \
    --name userver6 --file \
    /var/lib/libvirt/images/userver6.img

virt-clone creates a new XML definition file for the virtual machine, copies the image file for the virtual disk, and gives the network adapter a new, random MAC address. The remaining hardware components remain unchanged.

After cloning, however, much manual work is required: You need to modify the virtual machine's network configuration and change the hostname. If the original virtual machine ran an SSH server, you also need to create a new SSH key for the new virtual machine.

BoxGrinder

The manual intervention required after cloning is prone to error, so why bother cloning if you can create virtual machines from scratch with a single command? In the Red Hat world, the BoxGrinder project can help you [1]. With BoxGrinder, you can create virtual Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Scientific Linux machines in almost no time. Incidentally, BoxGrinder is not a KVM-specific tool: It can also cope with various other virtualization and cloud systems and – besides KVM – also supports VMware, Amazon EC2, and VirtualBox. Unfortunately, prebuilt BoxGrinder packages exist only for Fedora right now. The installation is straightforward:

yum install rubygem-boxgrinder-build

It looks like RHEL and CentOS users will have to wait

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