Packer templates for Oracle Linux

With this you make your own OEL 6.6, 6.7 or 7.2 image/machine which you can use with vagrant ( it can work with Virtualbox and Vmware)
but also you can generate the same image/machine for Oracle public cloud (OPC)

Contributions

Big thanks to Lucas de Souza Reis Gomes for all the help on OEL7 on OPC

OPC

For OPC you should use Qemu emulator and this will make

• a clean image ( no guest or vmtools)
• add the opc user
• sudo rights for opc
• key inject script
• tar.gz as export
• delete password & disable root

Follow the Oracle Cloud docs for uploading the image and to associate it. After that follow the normal flow

For now qemu is a bit slow ( can take a few hours ) because I cannot use the kvm accelerator on my mac. It only works fast on linux host or vm)

Software

Download Packer (tested with Packer version 1.0.0)

How to build a box, image

• Download OEL6.6 from edelivery
• Update the iso_location path variable in the oracle-linux-6.6-x86_64.json
• extract packer in your home folder.
• export PATH=~/packer_0.8.6_darwin_amd64:$PATH

For OEL6.6 Choose one

• packer build -only=virtualbox-iso oracle-linux-6.6-x86_64.json
  • This also requires virtualbox
• packer build -only=vmware-iso oracle-linux-6.6-x86_64.json
  • This also requires vmware fusion or workstation
• packer build -only=qemu oracle-linux-6.6-x86_64.json
  • Requires Qemu for linux or for mac

For OEL6.7 with UEK4 Choose one

• packer build -only=virtualbox-iso oracle-linux-6.7-x86_64.json
• packer build -only=vmware-iso oracle-linux-6.7-x86_64.json

For OEL6.7 with UEK3 for the OPC (UEK4 does not work, probably need to install the right Xen drivers)

• packer build -only=qemu oracle-linux-6.7-x86_64.json

For OEL6.9 with UEK4 Choose one

• packer build -only=virtualbox-iso oracle-linux-6.9-x86_64.json
• packer build -only=vmware-iso oracle-linux-6.9-x86_64.json

For OEL6.9 with UEK3 for the OPC (UEK4 does not work, probably need to install the right Xen drivers)

• packer build -only=qemu oracle-linux-6.9-x86_64.json

For OEL7.2 with UEK4 Choose one

• packer build -only=virtualbox-iso oracle-linux-7.2-x86_64.json
• packer build -only=vmware-iso oracle-linux-7.2-x86_64.json

For OEL7.2 with UEK4 for OPC

• packer build -only=qemu oracle-linux-7.2-x86_64.json

Qemu installation for mac osx

• brew install qemu —with-sdl

Qemu packer on a linux VM

Init

• vagrant init phusion/ubuntu-14.04-amd64
• enable nested x86 support ( also in the bios of your computer )
  • in vmware vb.vmx[“vhv.enable”] = “TRUE”
  • Virtualbox does not pass on vmx but you can try to set this in VBOX 5 vb.customize [“modifyvm”, :id, “—hwvirtex”, “on”] and vb.customize [‘modifyvm’, :id, ‘—paravirtprovider’, ‘kvm’]
• vagrant up

Install

• Download packer and add it to the root/vagrant folder
• Download OEL ISO and add it to the root/vagrant folder

For ubuntu

vagrant ssh
sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm qemu virt-manager virt-viewer libvirt-bin
egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo
kvm-ok

For OEL/CentOS 7

vagrant ssh
sudo -i
yum -y install qemu-kvm libvirt virt-install bridge-utils vnc
egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo
lsmod | grep kvm

Build

Update OEL 6 qemu config

• update iso_location to /vagrant
• headless true instead of false
• accelerator kvm instead of none
• update [“-machine”, “type=pc”] -> [“-machine”, “type=pc,accel=kvm”]
• For RHEL7 add “qemu_binary” : “/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm” to the Qemu packer definition

wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/1.0.0/packer_1.0.0_linux_amd64.zip
unzip packer_1.0.0_linux_amd64.zip
rm packer_1.0.0_linux_amd64.zip
sudo /vagrant/packer build -only=qemu oracle-linux-6.9-x86_64.json
vncviewer -Shared 127.0.0.1:5999

• move build output file to /vagrant and you can use it