Manage ISO images with the vss-cli

Installing a guest operating system is a very common task upon VM creation, and in order to reduce deployment time, we have included the ability of mounting an ISO image right after a VM has been created. With this users can power on the VM and start installing the desired OS without remotely mounting the ISO image, which depending of user’s bandwidth, could take longer because it has to transmit the ISO file contents to the VM.

Public and personal ISO images can be managed with the vss-cli compute iso command:

Usage: vss-cli compute iso [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Available ISO images in both the VSS central store and your personal
  VSKEY-STOR space.

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  personal  Browse current user images
  public    Browse public images

Public

Our ISO image catalog is composed by more than 220 ISO images (and growing) stored within our virtual environment to make a faster VM-ISO interaction, where users can pick and choose the most common Linux distributions, Windows, etc. or any other Software like SQL Server.

Currently, users can only list and use public ISO images with vss-cli compute iso public ls and those can be filtered and sorted with including the proper options:

Usage: vss-cli compute iso public ls [OPTIONS]

  List available ISO images in the VSS central store.

  Filter by name and sort desc. For example:
      vss-cli compute iso public ls -f name=like,Cent% -s path asc

Options:
  -f, --filter-by <TEXT TEXT>...  filter list by <field_name>
                                  <operator>,<value>
  -s, --sort <TEXT TEXT>...       sort by <field_name> <asc|desc>
  -a, --show-all                  show all results  [default: False]
  -p, --page                      page results in a less-like format
  --help                          Show this message and exit.

For instance, to look for a publicly available Ubuntu 18 image, the command could be something like:

vss-cli compute iso public ls -f name=like,ubu%-18% -s path asc

path                                                        name
----------------------------------------------------------  ----------------------------------
[vss-ISOs] Linux/Ubuntu/ubuntu-18.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso    ubuntu-18.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso
[vss-ISOs] Linux/Ubuntu/ubuntu-18.04-desktop-amd64.iso      ubuntu-18.04-desktop-amd64.iso
[vss-ISOs] Linux/Ubuntu/ubuntu-18.04-live-server-amd64.iso  ubuntu-18.04-live-server-amd64.iso

To successfully mount a public ISO to a VM, Path, Name or ID must be added to the VM command.

Now that we are familiar with the iso command in the VSS CLI, we can get the ISO file to mount into a virtual machine. First, we should obtain the VM’s UUID:

This version of the VSS CLI supports managing virtual machines not only using the UUID, but using names. In case of multiple results, the CLI prompts to select the right instance.

Finally, to submit the change request to mount the ISO, execute vss-cli compute vm set <name-or-uuid> cd up <unit> -b <name-or-path-or-id> as follows:

Personal

User provided ISOs can be managed with the vss-cli compute iso personal command:

In order to list or load a user ISO into a VM, users should upload the file to VSKEY-STOR and then execute a sync command to make the image file available in the ITS Private Cloud.

Assuming you have already uploaded a file, the command vss-cli compute iso personal sync should be executed.

Once you get a confirmation notification (email or message) ISO images should be visible through the CLI. To list just execute vss-cli compute iso personal ls and the output should look as follows:

The process of mounting the image to a VM is the same: first get the VM UUID and then execute vss-cli compute vm set <name-or-uuid> cd up <unit> -b <name-or-path-or-id> as shown below:

Virtualization, Servers and Storage

Manage ISO images with the vss-cli

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