Wednesday, March 20, 2013

eustore now supports bootable EBS images

Those of you familiar with Eucalyptus are likely already familiar with the eustore client, which is a utility included with the popular euca2ools.  It allows for the automatic fetching, uploading, and registering of instance-store based images in your Eucalyptus cloud.

It pulls its meta-data and images from http://emis.eucalyptus.com but currently filters on only our most tested images which include Fedora 16/17, Centos 5/6, and OpenSuSe 12.2.  Unfortunately, it provides no support for bootable EBS images.

However, as of today, you can beta test a new version of euca2ools that does include the ability for eustore to fetch, upload, and register your bootable EMS image:

yum install http://downloads.eucalyptus.com/testing/euca2ools/euca2ools-2.1.9999-0.0.1.20130315gitb1a30e90.el6.noarch.rpm

The new functionality is contained within the utility eustore-install-image.  To use it, you will need a bootable EBS image available on an accessible http server.  From there, you can simply point eustore-install-image to it and watch it work:

eustore-install-image -u <http://path.to/imagename.img> -v <image_size_in_GB> -k <eucalyptus_ssh_key>

You must have your SSH key located in your home directory and it should be named <keyname>.priv.  The utility assumes that you are passing it an unpacked EBS image bootable from /dev/sda1.

Please note that this has only been tested internally on a limited number of images and all feedback is not only welcomed but encouraged.  Enjoy!