vagrant-libvirt-image

How to create a test Libvirt Windows box for Ansible

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Create a Windows Libvirt Box
• Make the Windows box Ansible ready
• Final boxing of the Ansible ready Windows

To the difference of Linux and other free system, you can’t simply download Windows from Hashicorp’s repositories. If you’re using Vagrant with VirtualBox, you can at least download a Test VM from Microsoft, but you’re out of luck with Libvirt. The following lines explain how to solve this issue and make your box "Ansible ready".

Prerequisites

• a lot of diskspace:

  • 30 GBytes in ~/.vagrant

  • 20 GBytes where you have your libvirt images (generally /var/lib/libvirt/images)

• the approach surely works with other versions but here where the most relevant ones (on Fedora 28):

  • qemu-img-2.11.2-1.fc28.x86_64

  • libvirt-4.1.0-3.fc28.x86_64

  • virt-manager-1.5.1-1.fc28.noarch

  • vagrant-2.0.2-1.fc28.noarch

  • Vagrant plugins (installed via vagrant plugin install):

    • vagrant-libvirt (0.0.43)

    • winrm (2.2.3)

    • winrm-elevated (1.1.0)

    • winrm-fs (1.2.0)

  • ansible-2.6.1-1.fc28

  • python2-winrm-0.3.0-1.fc28 (and probably other Ansible module dependencies)

Create a Windows Libvirt Box

1. Go to Microsoft’s virtual machines Donwload site.

2. Select e.g. MSEdge on Win10 as Vagrant platform, and hover over the Download '.ZIP' button, you’ll see a link which you can use to download the VM, e.g. https://az792536.vo.msecnd.net/vms/VMBuild_20180425/Vagrant/MSEdge/MSEdge.Win10.Vagrant.zip

3. we’ll go to the command line and execute the following commands:

mkdir -p ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/MSEdgeWin10/0/libvirt
wget https://az792536.vo.msecnd.net/vms/VMBuild_20180425/Vagrant/MSEdge/MSEdge.Win10.Vagrant.zip # (1)
unzip MSEdge.Win10.Vagrant.zip
tar xvzf MSEdge\ -\ Win10.box
rm 'MSEdge\ -\ Win10.box'
rm box.ovf                                                               # (2)
cp ${GITDIR}/box/Vagrantfile .                                           # (6)
qemu-img convert -p -O qcow2 -S 4k 'MSEdge - Win10-disk002.vmdk' box.img # (3)
rm 'MSEdge - Win10-disk002.vmdk'
cp ${GITDIR}/box/metadata.json .                                         # (6)
qemu-img info box.img                                                    # (4)
vim metadata.json                                                        # (5)

1. the resulting zip file is roughly 4.3GB big

2. I studied it before to adapt my Vagrantfile, e.g. the network card

3. the resulting image is roughly 9GB big

4. note down the virtual size in GB

5. adapt the virtual size parameter accordingly

6. the files are available as box/Vagrantfile and box/metadata.json

Tip	we could call tar cvzf --sparse …​/MSEdgeWin10Libvirt.0.box box.img metadata.json Vagrantfile and create a "real" box that we could install somewhere else using vagrant box add /var/tmp/MSEdgeWin10Libvirt.0.box --name MSEdgeWin10 [--force].

Make the Windows box Ansible ready

After the last chapter, we can start the box:

mkdir emptydir
cd emptydir
vagrant init MSEdgeWin10                       # (1)
cp ${GITDIR}/Vagrantfile.example Vagrantfile   # (1)
cp ${GITDIR}/playbook-provision-windows.yml .  # (2)
vagrant up

1. either one of both, and adapt to your needs the Vagrantfile

2. you may also adapt playbook-provision-windows.yml but it’s just for showing provisioning here

Then:

1. The start principally works, even if Vagrant is stuck on the connection to "SSH" failing (the libvirt provider confuses SSH with WinRM and we haven’t yet enabled WinRM). Do not interrupt Vagrant.

2. Open the Virtual Machine Manager, you’ll see after a while a black screen with a mouse pointer, just reboot once the VM using the manager and it’ll look better.

3. You then possibly need to login as *IEUser* with password *Passw0rd!*.

4. In the Windows menu search for "PowerShell", you’ll find (hopefully) *Windows PowerShell (desktop app)*, right click on it and *Run as administrator*.

5. Use the console to call as described under WinRM setup:

   $url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/devel/examples/scripts/ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1"
   $file = "$env:temp\ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1"
   
   (New-Object -TypeName System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile($url, $file)
   
   powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File $file

   Tip	instead of typing this you can search for ansible windows_setup using the Edge browser, the URL above should be one of the first hits, click it and copy and paste the code from the browser into the PowerShell console.

6. Calling winrm enumerate winrm/config/Listener should then be successful

   Note	if you’re fast enough even the provisioning will work in Vagrant and you’ll see a ping pong; if not, you only have to vagrant halt the VM and vagrant up --provision it again. Be patient, booting takes a few minutes.

7. Trying a few ansible commands using Vagrant’s own inventory file:

   echo -e '[defaults]\ninventory=.vagrant/provisioners/ansible/inventory/vagrant_ansible_inventory' > ansible.cfg
   ansible -m win_ping default
   ansible -m setup default
   ansible -m win_whoami default
   ansible -m win_whoami default -b
   ansible -m win_shell -a 'winrm enumerate winrm/config/Listener' default

Final boxing of the Ansible ready Windows

Stop the VM with vagrant halt, then go to a directory with temporarily enough space for the size of the image (16G in my case) and call the following command:

mkdir -p ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/MSEdgeWin10/1/libvirt
cd ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/MSEdgeWin10/1/libvirt
sudo cp /var/lib/libvirt/images/MSEdgeWin10_default.img box.img
sudo qemu-img rebase -p -b '' box.img
sudo chown $(id -un).$(id -un) box.img
cp ../../0/libvirt/Vagrantfile .
cp ../../0/libvirt/metadata.json .

Caution

initially I’ve used the script ~/.vagrant.d/gems/2.5.1/gems/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.43/tools/create_box.sh to create a box and then install it, but it’s really timely inefficient and requires even more disk space, so I’ve analyzed the script and it should amount to the above commands; this said, it’s rather untested and feedback is more than welcome.

You can then either:

• remove the 0-version directory and move 1 to 0

• or keep both versions and create ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/MSEdgeWin10/metadata_url with any dummy content e.g. https://atlas.hashicorp.com/microsoft/windows, vagrant up complains but it doesn’t matter and we can have multiple versions of the same image.

Call then:

1. vagrant destroy

2. if you’ve worked solely with the 0-version, then you need to manually delete /var/lib/libvirt/images/MSEdgeWin10_vagrant_box_image_0.img.

3. vagrant up.

4. provisioning with Ansible should now work out of the box…​

   TODO

   reduce the size of the image, which became bigger, e.g. see https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Shrink_Qcow2_Disk_Files with sdelete and simple conversion using qemu-img convert old new.

Based on the created image, you can now do all kind of fancy Ansible-automation on Windows; tell us about your experience.