Appendix C. Building cloud images for Red Hat Satellite

Procedure

1. Enable and start a time-synchronization tool on your host. The host must be synchronized with the same NTP server as Satellite Server and any Capsule Servers.

   • On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and later:

     # systemctl enable --now chronyd

   • On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6:

     # chkconfig --add ntpd
     # chkconfig ntpd on
     # service ntpd start

2. Deploy the SSL CA file on your host so that the host can make a secured registration call.

   1. Find where Satellite stores the SSL CA file by navigating to Administer > Settings > Authentication and locating the value of the SSL CA file setting.
   2. Transfer the SSL CA file to your host securely, for example by using scp.
   3. Login to your host by using SSH.

   4. Copy the certificate to the truststore:

      # cp My_SSL_CA_file.pem /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors

   5. Update the truststore:

      # update-ca-trust

Procedure

1. In the Satellite web UI, navigate to Hosts > Register Host.
2. Enter the details for how you want the registered hosts to be configured.
3. On the General tab, in the Activation Keys field, enter one or more activation keys to assign to hosts.
4. Click Generate to generate a curl command.
5. Run the curl command as root on the host that you want to register. After registration completes, any Ansible roles assigned to a host group you specified when configuring the registration template will run on the host.

CLI procedure

1. Use the hammer host-registration generate-command to generate the curl command to register the host.
2. On the host that you want to register, run the curl command as root.

Procedure

1. Log in to the host as the root user.

2. Install the Puppet agent package.

   • On hosts running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and above:

     # dnf install puppet-agent

   • On hosts running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and below:

     # yum install puppet-agent

3. Add the Puppet agent to PATH in your current shell using the following script:

   . /etc/profile.d/puppet-agent.sh

4. Configure the Puppet agent. Set the environment parameter to the name of the Puppet environment to which the host belongs:

   # puppet config set server satellite.example.com --section agent
   # puppet config set environment My_Puppet_Environment --section agent

5. Start the Puppet agent service:

   # puppet resource service puppet ensure=running enable=true

6. Create a certificate for the host:

   # puppet ssl bootstrap

7. In the Satellite web UI, navigate to Infrastructure > Capsules.
8. From the list in the Actions column for the required Capsule Server, select Certificates.
9. Click Sign to the right of the required host to sign the SSL certificate for the Puppet agent.

10. On the host, run the Puppet agent again:

    # puppet ssl bootstrap

Procedure

1. Update the system:

   # yum update

2. Install the cloud-init packages:

   # yum install cloud-utils-growpart cloud-init

3. Open the /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg configuration file:

   # vi /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg

4. Under the heading cloud_init_modules, add:

   - resolv-conf

   The resolv-conf option automatically configures the resolv.conf when an instance boots for the first time. This file contains information related to the instance such as nameservers, domain and other options.

5. Open the /etc/sysconfig/network file:

   # vi /etc/sysconfig/network

6. Add the following line to avoid problems accessing the EC2 metadata service:

   NOZEROCONF=yes

7. Un-register the virtual machine so that the resulting image does not contain the same subscription details for every instance cloned based on it:

   # subscription-manager repos --disable=*
   # subscription-manager unregister

8. Power off the instance:

   # poweroff

9. On your Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation, connect to the terminal as the root user and navigate to the /var/lib/libvirt/images/ directory:

   # cd /var/lib/libvirt/images/

10. Reset and clean the image using the virt-sysprep command so it can be used to create instances without issues:

    # virt-sysprep -d rhel7

11. Reduce image size using the virt-sparsify command. This command converts any free space within the disk image back to free space within the host:

    # virt-sparsify --compress rhel7.qcow2 rhel7-cloud.qcow2

    This creates a new rhel7-cloud.qcow2 file in the location where you enter the command.

Procedure

1. Update the system:

   # yum update

2. Install the cloud-init packages:

   # yum install cloud-utils-growpart cloud-init

3. Edit the /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg configuration file and under cloud_init_modules add:

   - resolv-conf

   The resolv-conf option automatically configures the resolv.conf configuration file when an instance boots for the first time. This file contains information related to the instance such as nameservers, domain, and other options.

4. To prevent network issues, create the /etc/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules file as follows:

   # echo "#" > /etc/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules

   This prevents /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file from being created. If /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules is created, networking might not function properly when booting from snapshots (the network interface is created as "eth1" rather than "eth0" and IP address is not assigned).

5. Add the following line to /etc/sysconfig/network to avoid problems accessing the EC2 metadata service:

   NOZEROCONF=yes

6. Un-register the virtual machine so that the resulting image does not contain the same subscription details for every instance cloned based on it:

   # subscription-manager repos --disable=*
   # subscription-manager unregister
   # yum clean all

7. Power off the instance:

   # poweroff

8. On your Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation, log in as root and reset and clean the image using the virt-sysprep command so it can be used to create instances without issues:

   # virt-sysprep -d rhel6

9. Reduce image size using the virt-sparsify command. This command converts any free space within the disk image back to free space within the host:

   # virt-sparsify --compress rhel6.qcow2 rhel6-cloud.qcow2

   This creates a new rhel6-cloud.qcow2 file in the location where you enter the command.

   Note

   You must manually resize the partitions of instances based on the image in accordance with the disk space in the flavor that is applied to the instance.