Overview

When creating a new virtual machine, you need to configure the initial settings such as the hostname, IP address, and SSH keys. When creating virtual machines in batches, manually configuring the initial settings for each virtual machine can be laborious and time-consuming. To improve efficiency, you can install the Arcfra VM Initialization Tool for virtual machines, which automates the initialization configuration for virtual machines upon their first startup.

Arcfra VM Initialization Tool (hereinafter referred to as the "VM Initialization Tool") has been optimized based on the third-party tool to simplify compatibility relationships, reduce configuration complexity, and avoid redundancy after initialization. Built on cloud-init and cloudbase-init, the tool is used for the initialization configuration of Linux and Windows virtual machines.

• Linux virtual machines

  Provides initialization configuration for virtual machines through cloud-init and elf-python3.

  • cloud-init: Supports multiple Linux operating systems. Responsible for executing the process of virtual machine initialization configuration.
  • elf-python3: Provides an isolated Python environment for cloud-init to ensure execution without conflicts with the Python environment of the operating system.

• Windows virtual machines

  Provides initialization configuration for virtual machines through cloudbase-init and related scripts, and supports multiple versions of the Windows operating system.

The VM Initialization Tool automatically completes system initialization configuration for virtual machines. It runs only during the virtual machine startup process, and exits immediately upon completion without monitoring any ports. For Linux virtual machines, after the initialization configuration is complete, the tool automatically disables its functions to avoid affecting the regular operations of virtual machines.

Arcfra Virtualization Engine (AVE) supports virtual machine initialization by creating virtual machines using templates configured with the VM Initialization Tool. A virtual machine created from this template automatically includes the user-customized initialization data. The data is automatically mounted onto the virtual machine in the form of a USB disk as the data source (called config drive ISO), and is displayed as a QEMU HARDDISK USB Device within the virtual machine. Upon initial startup of a virtual machine, it automatically reads and applies data from the data source, ensuring the expected initialization is achieved.

Note:

After the initialization is completed, the data source remains mounted to the virtual machine without affecting the operating system.

You can use the tool to complete the following initialization configurations.

• Hostname

• Default user password

  • The default user for Linux virtual machines is root.
  • The default user for Windows virtual machines is Admin.

• SSH public key for remote login

• DNS server

• IP address. You can dynamically acquire the IP address through DHCP, or configure a static IP address.

• Custom user data. You can automate more configurations by setting the scripts.

For details, refer to the official cloud-init documentation and official cloudbase-init documentation.