Provisioning Fedora CoreOS on VMware
This guide shows how to provision new Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) nodes on the VMware hypervisor.
Prerequisites
Before provisioning a FCOS machine, you must have an Ignition configuration file containing your customizations. If you do not have one, see Producing an Ignition File.
You also need to have access to a working VMware infrastructure, supporting VMs with at least hardware version 13. The examples below use the govc command-line tool.
Downloading the OVA
Fedora CoreOS is designed to be updated automatically, with different schedules per stream. Once you have picked the relevant stream, you can download the latest OVA:
STREAM="stable"
mkdir ova-templates
coreos-installer download -s "${STREAM}" -p vmware -f ova -C ./ova-templates/
Alternatively, OVA images can be manually downloaded from the download page.
Encoding Ignition configuration
For the vmware
provider, Ignition requires two "guestinfo" fields to be
present when the VM is first booted:
-
guestinfo.ignition.config.data.encoding
: the encoding of the Ignition configuration. -
guestinfo.ignition.config.data
: the content of the Ignition configuration, encoded according to the format above.
For maximum compatibility, it is recommended to use base64
encoding and to
prepare the Ignition configuration as such:
CONFIG_B64=`cat example.ign | base64 -w0 -`
Booting a new VM on vSphere
This section shows how to use vSphere facilities to configure and run VMs from the command-line. Similar steps can be performed via the graphical UI too.
Importing the OVA
The downloaded OVA has to be first imported into vSphere library:
FCOS_OVA='./ova-templates/fedora-coreos-31.20200210.3.0-vmware.x86_64.ova'
LIBRARY='fcos-images'
TEMPLATE_NAME='fcos-31.20200210.3.0'
govc session.login -u 'user:password@host'
govc library.create "${LIBRARY}"
govc library.import -n "${TEMPLATE_NAME}" "${LIBRARY}" "${FCOS_OVA}"
Setting up a new VM
You can now deploy a new VM, starting from the template in the library and the encoded Ignition configuration:
VM_NAME='fcos-node01'
govc library.deploy "${LIBRARY}/${TEMPLATE_NAME}" "${VM_NAME}"
govc vm.change -vm "${VM_NAME}" -e "guestinfo.ignition.config.data.encoding=base64"
govc vm.change -vm "${VM_NAME}" -e "guestinfo.ignition.config.data=${CONFIG_B64}"
A new fcos-node01
VM is now available for booting. Its hardware
configuration can be further customized at this point, and then powered-up:
govc vm.info -e "${VM_NAME}"
govc vm.power -on "${VM_NAME}"
First-boot networking and Ignition
Ignition supports referencing remote content in configuration and fetching it at provisioning time. For this reason, on first-boot FCOS instances try to perform network autoconfiguration via DHCP.
If your VMware setup employs static network configuration instead, you can
override this automatic DHCP setup with your own custom configuration.
Custom networking command-line ip=
parameter can be configured via
guestinfo properties as shown below, before booting a VM for the first time.
The provisioning flow follows the usual steps, plus an additional
guestinfo.afterburn.initrd.network-kargs
entry.
if you are using a provisioning method other than govc , make sure that the
guestinfo attribute is provisioned in the VM’s Advanced Configuration
Parameters (also known as ExtraConfig ). Some management tools may default
to a vApp Property instead, which does not work in this scenario.
|
VM_NAME='fcos-node02'
IFACE='ens192'
IPCFG="ip=192.0.2.42::192.0.2.1:255.255.255.0:${VM_NAME}:${IFACE}:off"
govc library.deploy "${LIBRARY}/${TEMPLATE_NAME}" "${VM_NAME}"
govc vm.change -vm "${VM_NAME}" -e "guestinfo.ignition.config.data.encoding=base64"
govc vm.change -vm "${VM_NAME}" -e "guestinfo.ignition.config.data=${CONFIG_B64}"
govc vm.change -vm "${VM_NAME}" -e "guestinfo.afterburn.initrd.network-kargs=${IPCFG}"
govc vm.info -e "${VM_NAME}"
govc vm.power -on "${VM_NAME}"
The full syntax of the ip=
parameter is documented in
Dracut
manpages.
For further information on first-boot networking, see Afterburn documentation.