Hi again Bill Miller here, and welcome to the videos addressing image and virtual machine management. These videos deal with capturing or running virtual machine as an image. We'll deal extensively in these videos with Cloud-init. Cloud-init needs to be set up on the virtual machine before you can capture it, and then we'll move on to touch on aspects of image creation and virtual machine deployment as well. The topics in these videos are listed in this graphic and the current section is highlighted. This is going to cover the first video here. Let's get started. Now, an image contains applications, and all their dependencies. That includes the operating system, third-party softwares or applications, and configurations. You want to think about what all that means. PowerVC enables administrators and users to capture and deploy virtual machines. The captures create something we call images. But the VMs that you're going to capture have to meet specific requirements before you capture them. We're going to cover that fairly extensively as well, including Cloud-init. All volumes that belong to the VM can be included in the image that is generated by the capture, or some of them. We'll talk about the fact that the boot volume though as you would imagine, needs to be in there no matter what. Now, in considering the whole process of implementing PowerVC, the administrator needs to take a survey, take stock of the virtual environment and filter out the most commonly used operating system images. You want to think of these images as what we call gold images. Those are going to be shared to users on their self-service cloud portal and probably used by them as administrators when they're doing deploys that are going to generate out of the administrator, set of resources rather than self-service. The results of this should be that the administrator creates gold images that represent the cloud solution catalog of the organization, and it should look something like this. An image, is a container for applications and all their dependencies, about that a moment ago. Operating system, third-party libraries, third-party applications, their configuration, middleware, user definitions, tunings, things like that. It's a file, it's a collection of information that contains the VMs hard disk image, including the kernel boot partition root file system, whatever's appropriate per the operating system type. Images are the basis for creating a cloud solution catalog for the organization, for their administrators to use and the cloud users especially. Then, like I said, administrators can tune the operating system, middleware the applications, and bundle this altogether into an image that can be reused. Again, that's referred to as a gold image. PowerVC enables administrators and users, but primarily administrators, to capture images from existing VMs and then the deployment of those is referred to as provisioning in the cloud. Self-service users would have the ability to do this provisioning similar to what administrators traditionally have done to create new VMs. PowerVC enables this capture to create an image that's then stored in the PowerVC server. That virtual machine image then can be used to create and provision virtual machines within the managed virtualization environment that was assessed by the administrator. Philosophically that's the strategy, so let's move on let's get into some of the details here. An image consists of metadata and one or more binary images. One of which must contain a bootable disk. To create a virtual machine in PowerVC, you have to have access to an image, you have to deploy an image. Now there are two ways to obtain an image, you can manually add an existing virtual machine to your PowerVC environment and capture that as an image. We've talked about managing an existing VM in the past. Or you can import a volume backed image from your backing storage. You can also import images with multiple volumes if you have the image with multiple volumes associated with it. It's either a manual management and capture or it's an import. Now operations that you're going to encounter for images once you have an image in place is capture and deploy, as I said, and then import and export, which I've touched on before. Capturing rather is creating an image of a virtual machine that you can deploy later. This is something that probably needs to be said here. The virtual machine doesn't necessarily have to be one that was managed from an existing VM, from an existing L part, it can be one that was deployed. You can deploy a VM into PowerVC, then turn around and make modifications to it and then capture that into an image. Importing and exporting we've discussed, importing is bringing in an image from a volume backed storage location, and exporting is doing the opposite of that. Deploying images is where the real value of PowerVC is recognized. The image that was created is used to create a new virtual machine, with the image's storage volume serving as the source for a copy to the new virtual machine's storage volumes. The deployment can target a specific host or a host group. Let's talk about capturing in more detail. Now some setup is required on the virtual machine prior to its capture, of course, the VM has to exist. It was created manually in a PowerVM environment and then managed by PowerVC, or it was generated through a deploy in PowerVC itself. We saw how the management works in previous videos. As I mentioned in previous videos, the VM that you're working with, that's going to be the source for the image has to be fully virtualized from an I/O perspective. Of course the VM must be running a supported operating system, and the version of that supported operating system matters. There are some older versions that aren't supported, and there may be newer versions that come along that haven't been vetted yet in PowerVC. To be safe, I always recommend that the VM is powered off prior to the capture. That does it for the prerequisite basics. Now, a virtual machine image consists of metadata, as I've mentioned, that's data describing the configuration properties of the virtual machine. We've looked at the properties and specifications of images, you've seen a lot of those characteristics. That stuff is captured, it's harvested, and kept as part of the metadata. Then there's a copy, the bootable disk image. A PowerVC stores metadata in the glance database, and it's correlated with the virtual machine image. OpenStack supports a number of image types, we'll be using the storage backed image type that PowerVC supports. In the graphic, you see an example of the PowerVC image metadata for a relVM that's running on PowerVM. Now, moving on, this graphic describes the steps to capture a VM at a high level. Notice the second item, Cloud-init installation, now we've got much more on that coming up, the step to power off the VM, as noted, is optional. This is to support capturing VMs that cannot be brought down. Let me pause here, I'll cover Cloud-init, and preparing Cloud-init in a VM, so that it can be captured and ultimately deployed.
