Introduction

Creating a new image is a step done outside of your OpenStack installation. You create the new image manually on your own system and then upload the image to your cloud.

To create a new image, you will need the installation CD or DVD ISO file for the guest operating system. You will also need access to a virtualization tool. You can use KVM for this. Or, if you have a GUI desktop virtualization tool (such as, VMware Fusion or VirtualBox), you can use that instead. Convert the file to raw once you are done.

Verify the Network

# virsh net-list

Name                 State      Autostart
-----------------------------------------
default              active     yes

*If its not active, start the network

virsh net-start default

Use the virt-manager X11 GUI

$ ssh -X root@server virt-manager

$ ssh -X user@server
$ sudo virt-manager

Click the Create a new virtual machine button at the top-left, or go to File ‣ New Virtual Machine. Then, follow the instructions.

Follow the onscreen instructions to complete the Installation

Once the Virtual Machine is up and running, Login using Credentials

Install Cloud Init

sudo apt-get install cloud-init

Configure the Cloud init

dpkg-reconfigure cloud-init

The account varies by distribution. On Ubuntu-based virtual machines, the account is called ubuntu. On Fedora-based virtual machines, the account is called ec2-user. You can change the name of the account used by cloud-init by editing the /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg file and adding a line with a different user. For example, to configure cloud-init to put the key in an account named admin, use the following syntax in the configuration file

users:
  - name: admin
    (...)

Shutdown the Virtual Machine

 /sbin/shutdown -h now

Clean up (remove MAC address details)

virt-sysprep -d trusty

The operating system records the MAC address of the virtual Ethernet card in locations such as /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules during the installation process. However, each time the image boots up, the virtual Ethernet card will have a different MAC address, so this information must be deleted from the configuration file. There is a utility called virt-sysprep, that performs various cleanup tasks such as removing the MAC address references. It will clean up a virtual machine image in place

Undefine the libvirt domain

virsh undefine trusty

Upload to Your project

openstack image create --disk-format qcow2 --container-format bare  --public --file ./centos63.qcow2 centos63-image