Fedora 32 on Google Cloud

Google doesn't provide a Fedora image for its cloud platform neither Fedora provides one. but this wont stop us. It is a nice learning and adventure for orthodox people like me.

Those who have started there career in Computer in late 80's and early 90's can understand my pain 😬

Well during this time of pandemic COVID-19 I thought of taking an adventure ride into the world of Virtualization. Though Virtualization is not new to me, as during my days at RedHat I did some virtualization stuff by porting drivers, but that is a very short lived assignment for me. Even I was fascinated by Vmware's ESX server Community edition. Even to tryout my toy Operating System NanoOS i need some platform to try out so Was using qemu and BOCHS.
But setting up a VM in a cloud is just a new thing for me. If you like to learn along and how to do it then read along.

Prerequisites 

As I don't know much about Windowz, will restrict to Google's cloud console as much as possible and at some times Linux desktop.

• Google account
• Machine with Fedora Desktop(any Linux distro will do but I like Fedora)
• Google SDK for Linux installed on your machine.

Deploying a VM needs availability of an Image. Though there is no image for Fedora 32 but similar images are available for CentOS and RHEL. We could choose any but I would prefer CentOS over RHEL.

Plan of Action 

• We will create a VM using CentOS image. This will be a very minimum one as we will use it for creating Fedora 32 image.
• Download Fedora cloud image from Fedora download site
• Tweek Fedora image to make it suitable for Google.
• Upload the image
• Create an instance of it 

Creating a VM 

Here you need a google account your Gmail Account wont work here. You need to have cloud permission in your account. Please refer to google site for procedure. its not difficult but its not relevant here hence omitted.

Similarly install Google cloud SDK (gcloud and gsutil). Information about the procedure is available on Google SDK site.

• Login to Google cloud, the bellow screen will be displayed

• Click on menu (3 horizontal line)

• from drop down select Compute Engine

• Next it will display a page with all vm instances if available. for us it should be empty. Next on the top there is an icon with a plus

• Now a form will be displayed, it will ask to enter a name for your VM instance . We will put boiler-plate there. Dont worry about other options except Boot Disk.

• On Boot Disk option by default it will be debian. There is a button change next to it. Clicking it will display several options.

• On clicking change something like this will appear. We will select CentOS. On next screen it will ask which version to use. we will use CentOS 8 as it has dnf command. But If you prefere yum can choose other older versions too.
  
  

• Allow it for some time say 5 Minutes. then on VM Instance page our new VM will be displayed.

Ok we have successfully created a VM on Google Cloud now we can enjoy it for some time🙆 .Relax get a coffee and think what we have achieved.
After this point our journey will be some what tough as we will be doing some sysadmin job (yes SysAdmins are really great people They do a lot of hectic work to ease our life).

Click on ssh button at the end of the line of our newly created VM instance. It will open a newbrowser window with shell prompt of our VM. Check if all your commands are accepted or not.

Download Fedora cloud image

As we know there is no Google compatible image for Fedora available but Cloud images are available. We can download it and adjust  for Google compatibility. 
On the ssh terminal shell prompt check if wget is available or not. Else install it by using dnf or yum.

~]$ sudo dnf install wget

So go ahead and download  Fedora Cloud image. Choose raw image for convenience. Remember we are downloading into VM on google not onto our Desktop.

~]$ wget -c"https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/32/Cloud/x86_64/images/Fedora-Cloud-Base-32-1.6.x86_64.raw.xz"

it will be downloaded to the home folder in VM. Give it some time as it is a long file , but don't worry it will be downloaded in few minutes say 2 to 3 minutes.

Preparing the image

Now the raw file is downloaded as *.tar.xz format. It has to be extracted  first 

~]$ tar -xvf Fedora-Cloud-Base-32-1.6.x86_64.raw.xz

It is better to copy this file to a smaller name like disk.raw and work on that.

• mount the image

~]$ sudo losetup  /dev/loop0 disk.raw
~]$ kpartx -a /dev/loop0

mount the disk

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/disk
$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 /mnt/disk

• Bind mount some filesytem

~]$ sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/disk/dev
~]$ sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/disk/sys
~]$ sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/disk/proc

besides this another file has to be created that is /etc/resolv.conf content of that file is very small and as follows.

search domain.name
nameserver 8.8.8.8

Its now time to go into chroot

$ sudo chroot /mnt/disk

After chrooting check if ping works, that is if network works else adjust your network to work in chroot environment.

First thing to do is update the image. by

~]$ sudo dnf update

Next we have to install 

~]$ sudo dnf -y remove cloud-init
~]$ sudo dnf -y install google-compute-engine-tools
~]$ sudo dnf clean all

Now we are almost done. Google need some service to be enabled.

~]$ sudo systemctl enable google-accounts-daemon google-clock-skew-daemon \
    google-instance-setup google-network-daemon \
    google-shutdown-scripts google-startup-scripts

Well our Image is almost ready. Now we should leave chroot environment unbind and unmount the filesystems we have mounted earlier.

~]$ sudo umount /mnt/disk/dev /mnt/disk/sys /mnt/disk/proc
~]$ sudo umount /mnt/disk
~]$ sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0

In above steps, unmounting disk will throw "resource busy error" dont worry. Give it some time to finish writing stuffs, 5 to 10 minutes maximum. then unmount the disk and delete the loop0. We are done.

Google need its image to be in *.tar.gz format so we will compres the image in tar.gz format.

~]$ tar cvzf fedora-32-google-cloud.tar.gz disk.raw

Now we will upload the image just created "fedora-32-google-cloud.tar.gz"

We have created in side Fedora VM. We have to put it into Google cloud bucket. Using Web console

• Goto Storage
• Create a bucket

remeber its name. Now from within VM we can copy this image to bucket.

~]$ gsutil cp "fedora-32-google-cloud.tar.gz" "gs://[name of the bucket]/"

Replace with your bucket name in above comand. Well it will be uploaded to the bucket in a while. It can be seen listed under the bucket created.

From your desktop fedora fire this command.

~]$ gcloud compute images create --source-uri \
    gs://[your bucket]/fedora-32-google-cloud.tar.gz \
    --licenses "https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/vm-options/global/licenses/enable-vmx" \
    fedora-32-google-cloud-image

Wait for few seconds, an image will be created in images section of console. it can be seen under Images section of Web console. Note the --licenses calause. it is optional. you can omit it. but if you omit it then the created image wont be able to run virtual machines under it. Yes you read it correctly a Nested VM.

I think you enjoied your second coffee ... Jocking...

Now the image is ready and we can create an instance out of it as we created our boiler-plate only difference will be in case of Boot Image we will choose our image and we will choose a multi CPU configuration. After the instance is created check it using SSH and enjoy your Multi CPU Fedora Server on Google cloud.

Well This is enough for Now. Please contact me if you need any help.

73's
DE VU3VFU
Ashok.

Sources :
1) major io
2) linuxmint
3) media com