Custom System VM template

[kapsch-gtanya]

Hello,

Is it possible to have your custom System VM template in an easy way? For example, to have another SO, or provision some files.

Thanks!

[DaanHoogland]

@kapsch-gtanya , defining your own systemvms is certainly possible. This is mainly intended to have your custom upgrades.

From your question I reads that you want to use another OS. This will require large changes to the system. The MS now expects certain commands to work in certain ways on the OS of the systemvm to configure it. The agent on the secondary storage may mount at expected mountpoint, for instance. I have no idea what dragons you might find.

[kapsch-gtanya]

We used to use Oracle Linux as our base distribution. We want to add some custom files/scripts. We have two option: to update this files/scripts to work on the current SystemVM or to have a SystemVM with OL9. In any case, I couldn't find documentation related to any option.

[weizhouapache]

@kapsch-gtanya
the system template is built by packer
please refer to https://github.com/apache/cloudstack/tree/main/tools/appliance

[kapsch-gtanya]

I've tried to make a custom template adding a new script with the appliance tools from CloudStack, to configure proxy files. It work in storage VM and K8S nodes. But it doesn't work in Virtual Router. On that, it creates the VM (I see with virsh list) but it's not shown in CloudStack UI.

In the Virtual Router page and when we create an instance we get the error (but this comes from management log):

2025-01-21 07:20:42,020 ERROR [c.c.a.ApiAsyncJobDispatcher] (API-Job-Executor-8:[ctx-5e8993dd, job-42]) (logid:5baaf4b2) Unexpected exception while executing org.apache.cloudstack.api.command.admin.vm.DestroyVMCmdByAdmin java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: org.apache.cloudstack.utils.CloudStackVersion.parse(String) passed 0, but requires a value in the format of int.int.int(.int)(-<legacy patch>)

I think it doesn't initialize successfully, because the folder /usr/local/cloud/systemvm/ doesn't exists inside the VM.

As a workaround, we've setup the installation with our custom system vm and once the zone is created, we have added the cloudstack system vm template as a router template. After we have configured the proeperty router.template.kvm to use this template. With this we can work, but it's not ideal.