I’m a fan of using the same OS image across multiple environments. So, I’m a fan of using cloud images, those with cloud-init installed, even outside of a cloud.
The trick to this is properly triggering the NoCloud datasource. It’s actually more of a pain than you would think, and not very well documented. Here’s my recipe (from Fedora 19),
wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/20-Beta/Images/x86_64/Fedora-x86_64-20-Beta-20131106-sda.raw.xz
xz -d Fedora-x86_64-20-Beta-20131106-sda.raw.xz
echo "#cloud-config\npassword: fedora\nchpasswd: {expire: False}\nssh_pwauth: True" > user-data
NAME=node0
cp Fedora-x86_64-20-Beta-20131106-sda.raw.xz $NAME.raw
echo "instance-id: $NAME; local-hostname: $NAME" > meta-data
genisoimage -output $NAME-cidata.iso -volid cidata -joliet -rock user-data meta-data
virt-install --import --name $NAME --ram 512 --vcpus 2 --disk $NAME.raw --disk $NAME-cidata.iso,device=cdrom --network bridge=virbr0
Login with username fedora and password fedora.
You’ll also want to boost the amount of RAM if you plan on doing anything interesting in the guest.
You can repeat lines 6 through 10 to start multiple guests, just make sure to change the name in line 6.
If you want to ssh into the guest, you can use virsh console, login and use ifconfig / ip addr to find the address. Or, you can use arp -e and virsh dumpxml to match MAC addresses. Or just arp -e before and after starting the guest.
Note, you need to follow the meta-data and user-data lines very closely. If you don’t you may not trigger the NoCloud datasource properly. It took me a number of tries to get it right. Also, the volid needs to be “cidata” or it won’t be found, which turns out to be a configurable parameter for NoCloud. The chpasswd bit is to prevent being prompted to change your password the first time you login.
Consider becoming a fan of consistent OS images across your environments too!
Spinning 