63 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
63 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
= Make Alpine Linux VM Image
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:script-name: alpine-make-vm-image
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:script-sha1: ddf44e4132a32e762cd0ae46e12c0122c5c18877
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:gh-name: alpinelinux/{script-name}
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:version: 0.8.0
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ifdef::env-github[]
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image:https://github.com/{gh-name}/workflows/CI/badge.svg["Build Status", link="https://github.com/{gh-name}/actions"]
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endif::env-github[]
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This project provides a script for making customized https://alpinelinux.org/[Alpine Linux] disk images for virtual machines.
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It’s quite simple (300 LoC of shell), fast (~32 seconds on GitHub Actions) and requires minimum dependencies (QEMU and filesystem tools).
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TIP: Don’t need VM, just want to chroot into Alpine Linux (e.g. on CI)?
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Try https://github.com/alpinelinux/alpine-chroot-install[alpine-chroot-install]!
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== Requirements
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* Linux system with common userland (Busybox or GNU coreutils)
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* POSIX-sh compatible shell (e.g. Busybox ash, dash, Bash, ZSH)
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* qemu-img and qemu-nbd (automatically installed by the script if running on Alpine)
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* e2fsprogs (for ext4), btrfs-progs (for Btrfs), or xfsprogs (for XFS) (automatically installed by the script if running on Alpine)
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== Usage
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Read documentation in link:{script-name}[{script-name}].
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See link:.github/workflows/ci.yml[] for GitHub Actions example.
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You can copy link:{script-name}[{script-name}] into your repository or download it on demand, e.g.:
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[source, sh, subs="+attributes"]
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wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/{gh-name}/v{version}/{script-name} \
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&& echo '{script-sha1} {script-name}' | sha1sum -c \
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|| exit 1
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== Pitfalls
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=== Creating Image for VMware (ESXi)
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VMware and disk images (virtual disks) is one big mess.
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You can find that VMware uses the VMDK format, but the problem is that this is not a single format.
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Actually it has many subformats with very different structure and various (in)compatibility with VMware hypervisors.
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When I’ve created a disk image using `qemu-img create -f vmdk` or converted Qcow2 to VMDK using `qemu-img convert -O vmdk`, vSphere client loaded this image without any problem, but the data was corrupted.
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Eventually I found in some old documentation that ESXi does not support “sparse” disks…
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So after many trials I found out that the least bad and functional solution is to create Qcow2 image and then convert it to VMDK using:
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[source, sh]
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qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O vmdk -o adapter_type=lsilogic,subformat=monolithicFlat alpine.qcow2 alpine.vmdk
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Unfortunately, this creates a “thick” image, i.e. its size equals the “provisioned space”, not actually used space as in Qcow2.
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However, you can compress it with gzip to avoid transferring multiple gigabytes of zeros over network.
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== License
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This project is licensed under http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT/[MIT License].
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For the full text of the license, see the link:LICENSE[LICENSE] file.
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