Virtual Machine from a Hard Disk Image with virt-install --import

This is one of many ways to create a virtual machine. This way starts with a hard disk image.

NAME=sles12sp2b4
IMG=https://example.com/images/SLE_12_SP2_Beta4-x86_64-default.qcow2
wget -O /var/lib/libvirt/images/$NAME $IMG
virt-install --name $NAME \
       --ram 2048 --graphics type=vnc \
       --network bridge=br0 \
       --import \
       --disk bus=virtio,path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/$NAME

For IMG I used a SUSE-internal server with SLEnkins images.
The tricky part is knowing the right value for the --disk bus setting. At first I used the default but the machine wouldn't boot because it would see /dev/sda instead of /dev/vda it was expecting.

kiwi2puppet

I have started working on kiwi2puppet, a tool to convert KIWI image descriptions to Puppet manifests.

The goal is to recycle the data that went into the building of an image and use it for managing a deployed appliance.

So far it is a prototype that can write these resources

• package
• yumrepo
• user
• group

It is written in Ruby, like Puppet.

Source at GitHub: http://github.com/mvidner/kiwi2puppet
RPMs: http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=kiwi2puppet&baseproject=ALL (currently it is a single Ruby script, so at the moment RPMs are not worth any trouble)
Novell Reference: FATE#309497

Get in touch if you're interested.

In case you didn't know:

"The openSUSE KIWI Image System provides a complete operating system image solution for Linux supported hardware platforms as well as for virtualisation systems like Xen Qemu or VMware."

"Puppet is an open source data center automation and configuration management framework. Puppet provides system administrators with a simplified platform that allows for consistent, transparent, and flexible systems management."