Revision 20 as of 2011-02-22 16:35:59

Clear message

Intro

The term 'UEC Images' refers to the Official Ubuntu images that are available at http://uec-images.ubuntu.com . These images are built by Canonical. They are then registered on EC2, and compressed tarfiles are made also available for download. For using those images on a public cloud such as Amazon EC2, you simply choose an image and launch it. To use those images on a private cloud, or to run the image on a local hypervisor (such as KVM) you would need to download those images and either publish them to your private UEC cloud, or launch them directly on a hypervisor

UEC Images on Amazon EC2 Cloud

In order to start using official Ubuntu images on the public cloud (ex. Amazon EC2), you

  • Define the Ubuntu release you want to use (Lucid, Maverick, Natty...etc)
  • Get the latest AMI ID corresponding to the release you want to use
  • Launch your chosen image on EC2

Choosing an Ubuntu Release

Choosing the Ubuntu release depends on a lot of factors such as whether or not you would like to launch an LTS image for long term support, or whether you need specific versions of libraries or applications. If in doubt, choose the latest LTS release (currently Lucid 10.04)

Get Ubuntu AMI-ID

As Ubuntu cloud images are uploaded and registered on the Amazon EC2 cloud, they are referred to as AMI (Amazon Machine Images). Each AMI is a machine template from which you can instantiate new servers. Each AMI has its own unique ID. In order to launch an instance on the EC2 cloud, you first need to locate its ID. The AMI Locator web application can help you quickly locate an AMI ID. Here's how to use it

  • Visit AMI Locator

  • Type a few characters in the search box signifying what you're searching for. For example if you would like to find out the AMI-ID for the latest release of Maverick Meerkat to run on a 64 bit ebs instance in the us-east region, you would search for "mav 64 us-east ebs" or a subset thereof.

ami-maverick.png

Launch Ubuntu AMI

UEC Images on UEC Private Cloud

If you are running your own private UEC cloud, you may wish to publish new Ubuntu UEC images (as they are made available) to your cloud infrastructure. While UEC provides an easy to use Web Store to locate, download and register images from, sometimes it is still beneficial to download UEC images manually and upload and register them

Downloading Daily and Released Images

UEC images are created in two flavors. "Daily" is a daily composed image that provides a fresh but perhaps less tested image. and "Release" that provides regularly updated and well tested images

"Daily" builds are made available for testing and continuous integration. The daily builds are not tested at all. However, the content of the images has already been through the SRU process, so in general the daily builds for stable releases are stable. Quality of daily builds for the development release will vary.

Daily builds are available under http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/<codename> .

Released builds are available under http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/releases/<codename> .

Once you have downloaded a suitable image, you most likely want to publish it to your private cloud, a process called BundlingImages

UEC Images on Local Hypervisor

Images after 10.10 can now be run outside of the cloud environment without any difficult setup, and even provide an easy way to provide metadata to the instance! If you would like to run a UEC image on your local KVM hypervisor, checkout the previous section explaining Downloading Daily and Released Images then untar the image and boot it. Here is an example to make things clearer

  • The Image file name will vary. For this example, it is "maverick-server-uec-amd64.tar.gz". 

    $ tarball=maverick-server-uec-amd64.tar.gz

  • Extract the tar file and set some variables names for its contents. Here is an example 

    $ contents=${tarball}.contents
$ tar -Sxvzf ${tarball} | tee "${contents}"
maverick-server-uec-amd64.img
maverick-server-uec-amd64-vmlinuz-virtual
maverick-server-uec-amd64-loader
maverick-server-uec-amd64-floppy
README.files
$ base=$(sed -n 's/.img$//p' "${contents}")
$ kernel=$(echo ${base}-vmlinuz-*)
$ floppy=${base}-floppy
$ img=${base}.img

  • Create a copy on write disk image, based on the disk image we downloaded and boot that image in local kvm 

    # make a qcow image just to keep the original pristine
$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b ${img} disk.img
$ kvm -fda ${floppy} -drive if=virtio,file=disk.img -boot a

  • Get the password for 'ubuntu' and log in
    The default selection in the grub menu will result in a randomly generated password for the 'ubuntu' user on first boot. The password is written two places, the console and the serial device. On the console, you will see lines like: 

    [    1.820549] EXT4-fs (sda): re-mounted. Opts: (null)
::uncloud-init: settting ubuntu pass = qlnYZTSy
::uncloud-init: changing ubuntu user's password!
::uncloud-init: enabled console on ttyS0

    The password is also written to the kvm serial console. You can see the kvm serial console by hitting ctrl-alt-3. On first boot, you will see lines like 

    ===                                                                             
ubuntu_pass = PhAKp1kx                                                          
===

  • Want to get that first boot again? Easy, just delete the cow disk, create a new one and boot it 

    $ rm -rf disk.img && qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b ${img} disk.img
$ kvm -fda ${floppy} -drive if=virtio,file=disk.img -boot a

You can customize the way UEC Images boot under a local KVM instance by passing certain kernel command line variables. This approach enables you to pass custom cloud-init data-sources, set the instance's password, hostname, instance-id ...etc. If that interests you, you can read more about passing KVM Kernel Options

Customizing UEC Images Boot Sequence with Cloud-Init

cloud-init is the Ubuntu package that handles early initialization of a cloud instance. It is installed in the UEC Images and also in the official Ubuntu images available on EC2. UEC images contain CloudInit as well as uncloud-init

uncloud-init, is a behind the scenes tool that helps configure Ubuntu UEC images to run in a local hypervisor environment. uncloud-init helps set a password for user "ubuntu", enables password authentication in sshd configuration and spawns a login tty on the serial console

Building Your Own UEC Images

A reliable build process in place. Current UEC Images are built on a 10.04 LTS host from a 0.11 branch of vmbuilder. The build scripts are available under the automated-ec2-builds, and published to uec-images and EC2 using ec2-publishing-scripts.

Read more about creating your own image

Machine Consumable UEC Images Availability Data

In order to provide information about what builds are available for download or running on ec2, a 'query' interface is exposed at http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/query . This will allow users of the service to download images or find out the latest ec2 AMIs programmatically.

The data is laid out as follows:

  • There are 2 files in top level director 'daily.latest.txt' and 'released.latest.txt'. Each of these files contains tab delimited data, with 4 fields per record. daily.latest.txt has information about the daily builds, released.latest.tt about released builds: 

       <suite> <build_name> <label>     <serial>
   hardy   server       release     20100128
  • For each record in the top level files another set of files will exist: \

    • File

      Description

      <suite>/<build_name>/daily-dl.txt

      downloadable images data for all daily builds currently available

      <suite>/<build_name>/daily-dl.current.txt

      downloadable images data for the most recent daily build

      <suite>/<build_name>/released-dl.txt

      downloadable images data for all released builds

      <suite>/<build_name>/released-dl.current.txt

      downloadable images data for the most recent released build

      <suite>/<build_name>/daily.txt

      registered ec2 AMI data for all daily builds ever

      <suite>/<build_name>/daily.current.txt

      registered ec2 AMI data for the most recent daily build

      <suite>/<build_name>/released.txt

      registered ec2 AMI data for all released builds

      <suite>/<build_name>/released.current.txt

      registered ec2 AMI data for the most recent released built

  • The downloadable image data files contain 7 tab delimited fields: 

    <suite>  <build_name> <label> <serial> <arch> <download_path> <suggested_name>
maverick server       daily   20100826 i386   server/maverick/20100826/maverick-server-uec-i386.tar.gz  ubuntu-maverick-daily-i386-server-20100826

    Download path is relative to "http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/". Suggested name is the basename that this build would be published as in EC2.

  • The registered ec2 AMI data contain 10 tab delimited fields: 

    <suite>  <build_name> <label> <serial>    <root-store>   <arch> <region>  <ami>         <aki>        <ari>
maverick server       alpha3  20100803.2  instance-store i386   us-west-1 ami-ebdc8dae  aki-99a0f1dc <ari>


    For many images, there may be no ari registered, so the field may be blank.