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.
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
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
$ 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
search domain.name
nameserver 8.8.8.8
Its now time to go into chroot
$ sudo chroot /mnt/disk
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
~]$ gsutil cp "fedora-32-google-cloud.tar.gz" "gs://[name of the bucket]/"
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
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
