Create FreeBSD Current OpenStack Image on OVH Public Cloud

[fredericalix]

https://www.fralix.fr/posts/create_freebsd-current_openstack_image_on_ovh_public_cloud/

[kyledrake]

There's also some providers that come with freebsd support out of the box, if you want a less complex setup path https://www.vultr.com/servers/freebsd

[eatonphil → kyledrake]

Digital Ocean supports FreeBSD too.

But it's good to document these manual steps so you can port the effort to NetBSD, OpenBSD, SmartOS, etc. (I've had all those run on Linode).

[i_feel_great → eatonphil]

You don't happen to have documented these at all by chance? I am particularly interested in NetBSD.

[eatonphil → i_feel_great]

It's the exact same steps as the guide for FreeBSD [0] but you do it with a NetBSD install image instead.

I maintained an installer [1] for these systems a while ago but the images may not be available anymore, not sure.

[0] https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-d...

[1] https://github.com/eatonphil/linode_deploy_experimental

[privateSFacct]

Is the OpenStack story improved from a few years ago? Experience is mostly AWS - I'm up and running very quickly on AWS but 2+ years ago openstack was kind of a fight.

[cuuupid → privateSFacct]

IIRC it has improved a lot in usability, whereas AWS just gets more and more annoying to use.

There are also tons of guides for quick migrations: https://www.stratoscale.com/blog/compute/how-to-automate-the...

[mugsie → privateSFacct]

I am biased[1], but the OpenStack story is pretty good. Running it is always going to be more than "apt install openstack" - but there has been pretty good improvements in installers.

Juju (linked below), OpenStack-Ansible, or openstack helm all make deployment possible.

The end user story has been pretty consistent for a while, with additions for newer features, and high performance hardware always in the pipeline.

A lot of the horror stories from the early days were people expecting free, fire and forget ESXi - which it is not.

1 - I have been a project team lead on one of the sub projects for ~ 4 years, and more recently sit on the Technical Committee.

[timClicks → privateSFacct]

Deployment of OpenStack or deploying to OpenStack? If you're looking at deploying openstack to on-prem hardward, Juju is a proven ally here: https://youtu.be/bHKiKnlKk_k (Deploying OpenStack with Juju and MAAS)

Disclaimer: on the Juju team

[eatonphil]

Similar story on Linode [0].

[0] https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-d...

[fredericalix → eatonphil]

Really ???!!! With a cloud-init who run on FreeBSD>11 ??? Read my post before write your comment please. I was totally honest why and how I did it ! After is it very easy to integrate it under CI/CD system to update image.

[tryauuum]

(i think) you could use virt-sparsify instead of qemu-img to make final image even smaller

[kuzko_topia → tryauuum]

You can, we do this to reduce instance creation time. Though doing this by hand is tedious, that's nothing a good CI pipeline couldn't help with

[sebcat]

It's possible to build FreeBSD images for amd64 with nginx and a small but fairly complete base build at about 70 MB by just tweaking src.conf and a MINIMAL kernel with virtio built in. I do this for virtualization on DO, Vultr and my own bhyve machine. YMMV.