New smaller images for fast-vm and commands for generating them

With upcoming version 1.2 of fast-vm you will be able to use custom sized images and therefore I have decided to make some rebuild of older ones. New images are smaller than previous ones (6GB vs 10GB) and are generated using scripts rather than by hand. This provides more consistent results and hopefully eliminate human errors where possible. Performance wise images imports on my machine 30-40% faster compared to 10GB version and are up to 30% smaller than previous versions when compressed. Scripts used to create these images are available in same repository as XML and hack files for other public fast-vm images in 'ks' subfolder. Read further on how to use them.

Not all images were rebuilded so if you feel like contributing to automation of creating them feel free to send your commits! Batch of generated images consinsts of CentOS 6.3 up to 6.9 and CentOS 7.0 up to 7.3. While it may not make much sense to have images for CentOS it is a first step before testing them to build RHEL images which should really only verification that it works in same way as CentOS images. So in case that you have access to Red Hat ISO images, you can generate yourself fast-vm images from them.

How to generate CentOS/RHEL images using the provided scripts?

Before you start download the libvirt XML file for version you wanna install and binary DVD of CentOS/RHEL version you wanna to generate the image. Check files in /centos/ks directory from fast-vm-public-images repo. There are 2 types of files: Kickstarts that you can customize your installation and example scripts with virt-install command. Assuming you have all needed files in same directory, then below are commands you can use to generate CentOS 6.9 image for fast-vm.

fast-vm import_custom_image 6 centos-6.9 empty centos-6.3-7.3.xml
./virt-install-centos-6.sh /dev/vg_with_fast_vm/fastvm-centos-6.9 CentOS-6.9-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso centos-6.ks

Build of images provided in repository so far took around 3-4 minutes for CentOS 6.x systems and 8-10 minutes for CentOS 7.x systems.

Images can be downloaded from the Image list page