
CoreOS Vagrant Images - NSMeta
http://coreos.com/blog/coreos-vagrant-images/
======
hosay123
I don't want to sound overly negative, but attempting to support every useful
combination of hardware and drivers, particularly in any kind of supported,
certified configuration, ultimately leads back to the same result: just
running a real OS.

You can look at CoreOS the same way as the Xen hypervisor and VMWare ESX: the
more flexible these became (new hardware drivers, supported configurations,
etc. etc) the more they began to look like general purpose operating systems.
At which point, why not start with one? (Kvm followed the same logic)

I'd much rather see the guts of CoreOS available as e.g. a RHEL or Debian
package. As it stands, throwing away 20 years of distribution experience just
to avoid installing a few files on my server seems far from worth it.

~~~
devinus
You just described the actual draw of CoreOS. CoreOS is _just Linux_. Instead
of going the Xen route you just described, it can capitalize on being _just
Linux_ by supporting everything Linux _already supports_. At this point, you
can view CoreOS, which is _just Linux_ , as the "hypervisor." Containers don't
have to replicate key subsystems in every paravirtualized instance, as
containers share all the same subsystems like e.g. the TCP/IP stack. You're
also not throwing away any distribution experience. Want CentOS? Create a
CentOS container with Docker. Want Ubuntu? Create an Ubuntu container with
Docker. These are incredibly powerful ideas I'm just now being exposed to.

~~~
hosay123
Try telling your SAN vendor that you're running "just Linux" and can you have
a driver and support package for that please, and let us know how you get on.

When you're done there, now try plugging your nice new machine into the
corporate DC. Oh it seems it needs to support VLAN tagging. No problem, better
just write some new code for that.

Time to migrate a bunch of performance sensitive services. Uh oh, no support
for FusionIO PCI SSDs! Better write some more code.

Time to migrate your remote sites, only policy dictates certain services must
be physically encrypted. No problem, better just cutpaste Debian's cryptsetup
scripts and be done with it.

Oops, turns out we deployed 1000 machines with a duff BIOS setting. No
problem, I'm sure the server vendor has a support package for CoreOS..

We could come up with examples until we've basically reinvented a modern
Redhat/Debian initramdisk and boot environment.

~~~
devinus
That would have been a problem with every new distribution, including RHEL and
Debian when they were brand new. In reality, your SAN should be able to
accommodate a generic Linux kernel with any userland you can containerize.

~~~
hosay123
Yes, and ideally Microsoft Windows should be open source and IBM OS/360 would
have a build supporting Firefox running on my Nexus One, but that's not how
the world operates..

~~~
gnu8
Your sarcasm is tedious. If a SAN cannot support a generic Linux kernel, then
it's the fault of the vendor for not allocating enough dev hours to the Linux
kernel, and their product should not be chosen for a Linux environment.

~~~
hosay123
I'm not sure how else to respond to "let's reinvent a complete Linux
distribution because we've written a 20 line auto-updater".

This would have made sense to me a decade ago, but back then I just wouldn't
have understood the amount of work involved. You simply cannot produce a fully
generalized container OS without producing a fully generalized OS.

That aside, I actually _like_ the central idea of a better approach to
managing/updating a large group of host machines. I just don't think it
warrants yet another bikeshedded support/security/certifiability nightmare
(and lets face it, this is bikeshedding, there's absolutely no value in the
core claim of "it's just Linux", but it gives unfettered license to reinvent
the same old wheels all over yet again).

------
polvi
Alex from CoreOS here: This only supports virtualbox at the moment, but we are
actively working on adding VMware. Fill out the form on this page if you want
us to spam you when we have the vmware image (or others):
[http://coreos.com/](http://coreos.com/)

~~~
OafTobark
Any plans for Parallels?

~~~
turboroot
Vagrant supports VMWare, but not Parallels yet.

~~~
akulbe
Oh? I just tried to get one with the instructions on their github page, and it
said the box type was vbox. Are the vmware versions kept elsewhere?

~~~
hoverbear
He was talking about Vagrant (the tool CoreOS uses to distribute VM images)...

Also, I think you can just make a directory in the `~/vagrant.d/boxes/coreos`
folder called "vmware" and copy over the vagrant file, box.ovf and the
metadata.json. Then you just edit the metadata to have a vmware provider and
the box.ovf to reference "../virtualbox/<<theimage>>"

I however do not have a vagrant vmware license and cannot test this theory.

------
WestCoastJustin
To anyone wanting to learn more about Vagrant via a screencast, I've created
one @
[http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant](http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant)

------
ChikkaChiChi
Vagrant for the uninformed: Headless interface to VirtualBox and VMWare VMs on
OSX. Instancing is made a breeze.

~~~
DigitalJack
It isn't specific to osx is it?

~~~
jtreminio
It is not! Works on Linux, Mac and Windows.

------
damm
Ahh another Gentoo distro. Never ceases to amaze me how people troll it and
yet it keeps popping out in every nook and cranny.

[https://github.com/coreos/coreos-overlay/](https://github.com/coreos/coreos-
overlay/)

Must have been a good idea that no one got.

~~~
wmf
AFAIK CoreOS is based on ChromeOS which uses some parts from Gentoo. That
doesn't mean Gentoo was ever a good idea for general-purpose PCs or servers.

~~~
damm
Nice burn on Gentoo. I've had the job of supporting Gentoo on a PaaS and have
deployed it many places happily.

Sadly one of the dumbest arguments ever that will blacken the Linux horizon
for decades, big dick syndrome over what Linux distro you run.

~~~
vertex-four
Where can I find the page which guarantees me that any given version of any
given package will be fully supported by a defined security team for security
fixes for at least 2 years from release, preferably 3+?

That is my argument against using Gentoo. I have absolutely no idea how long
any given piece of it will be supported. If you can point me to a resource
which explains that, I might take another look.

I also have no interest in picking and choosing packages out of a bucket - I
want a stable, well-defined OS that I can build on, and preferably one which
is as close to what everyone else is using as possible so I can ask for help
from people who understand my OS.

Yes, it might work out if you're running at scale, have specialised needs, and
can dedicate resources to what essentially amounts to development of a forked
distro. It doesn't work out for me, as I need to know that the system I'm
building isn't going to be unsupported in a couple of months, and I need to
know I can talk to someone who is running similar versions of everything I'm
running if everything goes wrong.

~~~
rjbond3rd
Linux is a hotel. There are the guests (users) who expect service. Then there
is the concierge (distro) who smooths off the rough edges for the guests. Then
there are the back-room employees (contributors) who keep things running. And
behind them, the various leadership roles, e.g., architects, evangelists, and
people who invent distros.

In this scenario, you are a guest. It seems you're ringing the bell at the
front desk, and the unanswered question is: how are you willing to pay?

~~~
vertex-four
And to drop out of the metaphor, and explain why it's broken:

I thought one of the big points of open-source was that if something exists,
and it does what I want it to, I don't actually have to contribute (pay)
anything further than what I want to. I still will, if it benefits me or if
I'm interested, though.

As it turns out, there's a number of freely available distros maintained by
others who see personal benefit in maintaining said distros, and some of those
do have well-defined security and bugfix support infrastructure and teams.
Therefore, those fill my needs, therefore, there is no logical reason for me
to expend more effort than is necessary.

------
makerops
You guys really should change the logo to a cookie, every time I see the url I
think of oreos.

~~~
2mur
I was thinking it should be a chewed on apple core, but now I cannot unsee the
oreos... so I vote cookie logo too!

Cool project

~~~
Aldo_MX
How about a chewed oreo?

------
tbe
This reminds me of Bedrock Linux, which allows you to run multiple linux
distros on a single kernel instance. It does so using good old chroot, but has
an implementation that is capable of breaking out of the chroot when entering
a new one. This way the different environments become more integrated in that
a RHEL binary can call a Debian binary and so on, creating a sort of super
distro which is itself quite small and simple.

------
amalag
Simple question, but if there is no package management, how do you install
basic programs? Download binaries for everything?

~~~
devinus
Simple answer: you don't. Longer answer: It depends. Do you want to use yum or
apt-get to install programs? If you like CentOS, create a CentOS container
with Docker and begin installing programs using yum! Ubuntu? Spool up an
Ubuntu container and apt-get away! CoreOS is just the cradle upon which you
can run the userland of any distribution you please.

~~~
amalag
So CoreOS is the simple host OS, thank you for the clarification, i thought it
was a minimal guest OS.

------
passfree
This is not related to the Vagrant<->CoreOS topic but since Vagrant box image
format is a packaged ovf image it shouldn't be too hard to port the CoreOS
images to Vortex ([https://github.com/websecurify/node-
vortex](https://github.com/websecurify/node-vortex)).

------
hcarvalhoalves
What's the idea behind CoreOS? I found the site incredibly weak in information
about what it is.

~~~
devinus
I've just begun looking into and playing with CoreOS. Basically, it's a
minimal Linux image with Docker, service discovery using the `etcd` daemon
they've written in Go, and several interesting properties. The most
interesting is their use of the ChromiumOS build tools, allowing them to one
day update servers the same way e.g. ChromeOS is updated--using the Omaha
protocol to push raw binary diffs of the new root FS.

------
gchaix
Who put containers in my Vagrant!?

