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Creating a Packer Worker Virtual Server

Objective: Create a Virtual Server on CoreWeave Cloud to create images with Hashicorp Packer.

Overview: This process consists of deploying an Ubuntu Virtual Server on CoreWeave Cloud, with the cloned PVC attached. The Virtual Server is then configured with a Docker image to run Packer. Note that this example assumes a cloned PVC was created as explained in the example Copying CoreWeave Images to a Writable PVC.

References:​

Deploying Virtual Server​

Using packer_vs.yaml, we will deploy our Virtual Server withkubectl create -f packer_vs.yaml:

title="packer_vs.yaml"
apiVersion: virtualservers.coreweave.com/v1alpha1

kind: VirtualServer

metadata:

  name: packer-worker

  namespace: tenant-<tenant>

spec:

  region: ORD1

  os:

    type: linux

  resources:

    cpu:

      type: amd-epyc-rome

      count: 8

    memory: 32Gi

  storage:

    root:

      size: 256Gi

      storageClassName: block-nvme-ord1

      source:

        pvc:

          namespace: vd-images

          name: ubuntu2004-docker-master-20210629-ord1

    additionalDisks:

    - name: winsvr2019std

      spec:

        persistentVolumeClaim:

          claimName: winserver2019std-clone-20210701-ord1

  users:

    - username: <username>

      password: <password>

  network:

    public: true

    tcp:

      ports:

        - 22

  initializeRunning: true
Tip

Note our region matches the region used when creating the cloned volume

kubectl get vs will show us our Virtual Server has been deployed, along with an IP we can use to SSH into:

Configuring Packer Environment​

Using the external IP noted from kubectl get vs, connect to your Virtual Server via SSH. If you followed Copying CoreWeave Images to a Writable PVC, you'll notice our root disk is mounted to /dev/vda, and our cloned PVC is mounted to /dev/vdb:

Since our Virtual Server was created using ubuntu2004-docker-master-20210629-ord1, Docker is already installed. Running configure_packer_docker.sh will build a container to provide a consistent environment for using Packer, with all the dependencies installed.

title="configure_packer_docker.sh"
docker build -t "packer" -f - . <<EOF

FROM ubuntu:20.04



RUN apt-get update && \

    DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \

    libc6-dev libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-dev python3-winrm \

    qemu-kvm qemu-utils sshpass unzip curl wget git jq rsync \

    genisoimage openssh-client libguestfs-tools \

    yamllint moreutils ovmf



RUN wget -O /usr/local/bin/virtctl $(curl -L https://api.github.com/repos/kubevirt/kubevirt/releases/latest | grep browser_download_url.*-linux-amd64 | cut -d : -f 2,3| tr -d \")

RUN wget -O /usr/local/bin/kubectl https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl

RUN curl -L -s  https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/$(curl -L https://checkpoint-api.hashicorp.com/v1/check/packer | jq -r -M '.current_version')/packer_$(curl -L https://checkpoint-api.hashicorp.com/v1/check/packer | jq -r -M '.current_version')_linux_amd64.zip  --output /tmp/packer_linux_amd64.zip

RUN unzip -o /tmp/packer_linux_amd64.zip -d /usr/local/bin/

RUN chmod +x /usr/local/bin/*ctl

RUN rm -rf /tmp/packer_linux_amd64.zip



VOLUME /work

WORKDIR /work



ENV LIBGUESTFS_DEBUG=1 LIBGUESTFS_TRACE=1 PACKER_LOG=1



ENV PACKER_CACHE_DIR=/work/cache/packer



EOF
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