Definitely Ubuntu

I just found that there's a milestone for v1 that says it'll be done 6/28.

https://github.com/vatesfr/xen-orchestra/milestone/98

I've been looking into Talos Linux for an easier way to spin up Kubernetes clusters. It looks promising and I've used it manually setup a simple cluster in Xen-Orchestra. Now I'm trying to use Terraform to automate cluster creation.

Talos has a list of Cloud Platforms that it supports and I've been trying out the Nocloud platform so that I can pass it a cloud-init network config. I've tested this out by passing the correct parameter on the Talos boot menu and it works. (You have to set the boot paramter "talos.platform=nocloud.)

But in their releases they have a preconfigured Nocloud image. I figured I could use that with Packer to create a template, but I'm having a hard time getting it to work. I'm thinking maybe @ddelnano can help getting this work with the packer-plugin-xenserver.

I've been trying to piece together the details for how to get this working. The Talos documentation has documentation for using the nocloud platform but they don't use Packer in those docs. There are two platforms they support that they document using Packer - Hetzner and Upcloud - but I can't figure out how to use that knowledge to get this to work with packer-plugin-xenserver.

One of the issues seems to be that packer-plugin-xenserver requires an ISO, but the nocloud image they have released is not an ISO, it's a raw.xz file.

I'm not very experienced with Packer so I might just be missing something here.

If anyone has some insight on how to get this to work I'd appreciate it.

I just saw the blog post for project Pyrgos. This is exciting - especially since 90% of my usage of XCP-NG is to create k8s clusters. I currently have a messy IAC setup that utilizes Terraform and Ansible to provision a cluster. It works but streamlining that process would be great.

I've looked for more information about Pyrgos here but can't really find anything besides the original blog post. Is there more information that I'm missing?

@fohdeesha The VM has both of the netplan configurations in /etc/netplan - the original DHCP and CloudInit config.

> ls -la /etc/netplan/
total 16
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root 4096 Apr 15 12:44 .
drwxr-xr-x 104 root root 4096 Apr 15 17:59 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  193 Apr  9 16:27 01-netcfg.yaml
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  648 Apr 15 12:44 50-cloud-init.yaml

But the DHCP address is replaced by the new config. So yes, it successfully reads the new networking config, generates the config for Netplan, and applies it so the VM gets the correct address.

I was able to get this working!

I had read that it's important to delete anything existing in /etc/netplan otherwise it won't be overwritten by the new networking setup. But, first of all, that's not true in my case. And second, when there's nothing existing in that directory to start with, cloud-init doesn't run netplan apply for the new network setup (not sure why this is but I guess it's just a bug). So I just left the default Netplan DHCP setup in the template and now it works.

I'd be happy to give this to others to test, and then if it looks good, contribute it to the Hub. If anyone is interested let me know a place to upload the template.

I made the change in
https://github.com/lynchs61/xen-orchestra/blob/16ad1ad41f48230f6c27ef0e6c2a73ea7884d794/packages/xo-server/src/xapi/index.js#L2026

And I confirmed with my XO that it does in fact work to populate the metadata and set the NoCloud datasource mode to local. But unfortunately it still never runs netplan apply after it runs netplan generate. If I go into the VM after creation and run netplan apply everything is fine but it won't run it during the first boot.

@fohdeesha I did see that gist. And I also found that part in code in XO that sets the metadata for the config drive. Would it be possible to put in another metadata line in addition to the instance-id to specify the dsmode?

Nevermind. I thought I had it, but it was a false positive because I had an old networking config laying around in /etc/netplan that was providing the networking. It wasn't actually getting the networking from cloud-init running on first boot.

From what I can gather, I need to add dsmode: local to the metadata that is given to cloud-init. How do I do that from XO? Does that need to be added to the XO CloudConfigDrive?

Well I never figured out how to create this from scratch, but I did get it working.

I took the VM that was created from the original template (with the networking that wouldn't come up) and changed /var/lib/cloud/instance/datasource from

DataSourceNoCloud: DataSourceNoCloud [seed=/dev/xvdb][dsmode=net]

to

DataSourceNoCloud: DataSourceNoCloud [seed=/dev/xvdb][dsmode=local]

Then since this VM had already done it's first boot, I needed to run cloud-init clean to remove the cache.

Hmmm. I see in /var/lib/cloud/instance/datasource for the created VM, that is seems to still be in "net" mode

slynch@misc05:~$ cat /var/lib/cloud/instance/datasource 
DataSourceNoCloud: DataSourceNoCloud [seed=/dev/xvdb][dsmode=net]

So it looks like setting the dsmode in /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg doesn't work. Any idea how to set it properly?