Guest Operating Systems on

Overview

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This section details the necessary steps for preparing and deploying operating system images for virtual machines within an OpenNebula environment. It covers critical procedures for making VMs ready for production and ensuring compatibility and optimal performance.

The content is organized into the following key topics:

Contextualization: It focuses on the kvm_contextualization process, explaining how to inject configuration data (like network settings, SSH keys, or initialization scripts) into a VM instance during deployment, ensuring it is automatically configured upon boot.

Contextualization

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

OpenNebula provides a set of contextualization packages for different operating systems that integrates the VM guests with the OpenNebula services. The OpenNebula contextualization process allows to automatically:

Configure guest networking and hostname settings.
Set up user credentials for seamless VM access.
Define the system timezone.
Resize disk partitions as needed.
Execute custom actions during boot.

All the OS appliances available in the OpenNebula Marketplace come with all the software pre-installed. If you want to build these images yourself, take a look at the OpenNebula Apps project.

Creating Disk Images

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to creating OS disk images for your VM guests, you have several options:

OpenNebula Marketplace Appliances: Utilize ready-to-use OpenNebula Marketplace appliances.
OpenNebula Apps Project: Build or customize your own images using the build toolchain provided by the OpenNebula Apps project.
Manual Installation: Perform a manual installation directly in a running VM guest.

OpenNebula Marketplace Appliances

If you have access to the public OpenNebula Marketplace from your Front-end, you’ll find pre-configured images ready to run in an OpenNebula Cloud.

Windows Best Practices

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As a guest operating system on KVM hypervisors Windows requires some additional configuration in order to achieve performant Virtual Machines. In this document we’ll go over the best practices for deploying your Windows Virtual Machine and provide some extra actions that can be taken in Windows after deployment to improve performance.

Resource Allocations
Template Configuration
Post Deployment Actions

The best way to achieve high performance when using this guide is to also use better performing hardware, the disk will be the most relevant and performance will be greatly impacted on systems with HDDs rather than SSD/NVMe.

Operating System Profiles

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Sunstone you can quickly flavor a VM template by using an Operating System Profile, which will pre-fill part of the template for you. By default, Sunstone ships with a “Windows Optimized” profile which contains some basic Windows-specific optimization settings.

Defining a Profile

Navigate to the profiles directory

By default found in etc/one/fireedge/sunstone/profiles.
Create a new YAML file

Name your profile by defining a new .yaml file