image management 3.4 spec

Table of Contents Image Management Ingress Vectors Instance Import/Export Service Comments Notes References

Image Management

Image management is an umbrella for features which independently improve the simplicity, ease of use, and flexibility of ingressing images into Eucalyptus. The umbrella covers a number of interacting, but independently viable, pieces. Individually, the facets of the feature are meant to:

Increase fidelity w/ AWS by expanding support to include the kinds of images which are presently supported in AWS.
Improve tool support for bringing an existing image into Eucalyptus (from AWS, VMware, and, eventually, other sources).
Simplify the creation of registered images from instances currently running in Eucalyptus.
Automate the import of instances and volumes into Eucalyptus installation
Introduce validation of images through static image-based checking as well as runtime instance checks (to ensure an image runs and is otherwise minimally functional; e.g., ssh/rdp works for linux/windows images).
Provide tool support for the import of instances/images from VMware and AWS.

The way machine images are handled will receive attention in following areas:

**3.4 Image Management ToC**
Booting Disk Images	Test Plan	Support for direct boot of disk based machine images (i.e., kernel and ramdisk are embedded)
CreateImage and BundleInstance Enhancements	Test Plan	Creation of images from currently running instances; both linux & windows and instance-store & ebs.
The Imaging Toolkit	Test Plan	Collection of tools implementing image validation, conversion, and instance validation.
Imaging Workflows	Test Plan	Collection of tools implementing image validation, conversion, and instance validation.
Instance Import and the Imaging Service	Test Plan	User-facing services which validate, convert, and test images using the image toolkit. Also provides internal image conversion and validation in support of image registration, instance bundling, etc.
Imaging CLIs	Test Plan	Client tools which orchestrate the validation, conversion, and test just like the above service, but usable from the command line.
Instance Import Tools	Test Plan	Client tools which, using the above, enable the import of instances from AWS and VMware.
Upgrading Existing Images	Test Plan	Images registered prior to 3.4 will have to be adopted by the new imaging system.
Canonical Image Format (possibly)		The way the system stores images internally will converge on a single format (rather than doing on-the-fly conversion).
NOTE: Out-of-scope	The converse export functionality is not within scope as the AWS import services are limited to windows.

Ingress Vectors

Raw disk -> Eucalyptus: This is required for 3.4.
AWS -> Eucalyptus: This is desired for 3.4.
VMware -> Eucalyptus: This is desired for 3.4.
Other -> Eucalytpus: This is not within scope for 3.4.
Eucalyptus -> AWS: This is not within scope for 3.4.
Eucalyptus -> VMware: This is not within scope for 3.4.

Instance Import/Export Service

The Instance Import/Export Service ^[1] allows a user to extract an instance from VMware. The process works like this:

Extract the VMDK from VMware.
Bundle and upload the VMDK to S3.
Invoke the ImportInstance/ImportVolume (from EC2) with a reference to the S3 bucket.

The service then fetches the VMDK, validates its, spins up an instance, confirms the instance is setup correctly (by logging into it), and, eventually, provides the instance id to the user.

Comments

Support for OVA, OVF
Security restrictions
Access to resource expectations
Work through a specific use case

Notes

VM image import:
- is it using S3?
- validation: metadata (e.g., vsphere) and raw disk validations
- ability to pass parameters across the import interfaces
- component, activity, and information breakdown
- client, service, image toolkit, validations, verifications, and conversions diagrams
test cases for canonical image format change
- boot {disk,partition,disk w/ kernel & ramdisk} {linux, windows} {ebs, instance-store}