Centos5 is getting long in the tooth, but then again, many of my servers are antiques that would find native Centos6 to be problematic.
A recent adventure in disaster recovery led me to upgrade several of my Xen DomU’s from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6, but I was distressed to discover that about the minimum you can get by with on RAM for CentOS6 is nearly 400MB. I wanted to host several CentOS6 VMs, but the thought of getting dinged to the tune of half-a-GByte of RAM plus several gigs of disk image didn’t sit well for lightweight systems.
The “in” thing for this kind of stuff is Containers, which neatly fit in the space between a full VM and something less capable such as a chroot jail. The question was, could I get CentOS 6 containers to work in a CentOS5 Dom0?
As a matter of fact, yes, and it was considerably less painful than expected!
I cheated and did the real dirty work using my desktop machine, which is running Fedora 20, hence is better supported for all the bleeding-edge tools. Actually, Ubuntu would probably be even better, but I’m at home with what I’ve got and besides, the idea is to make it as little work as possible given my particular working environment.
Step 1: Vagrant.
Vagrant is one of those products that everyone says is wonderful (including themselves), but it was hard to tell what it’s good for. As it turns out, what it’s good for is disposable VM’s.
Specifically, Vagrant allows the creation of VM “boxes” and the management of repositories of boxes. A “box” is a VM image plus the meta-data needed for Vagrant to deploy and run the VM.
So I yum-installed vagrant on my Fedora X86_64 system.
My selected victim was a basic CentOS 6 box, since for the VirtualBox VM environment.
vagrant box add centos65-x86_64-20131205 https://github.com/2creatives/vagrant-centos/releases/download/v6.5.1/centos65-x86_64-20131205.box
Step 2. Docker
It would have been more convenient to get a ready-made Centos6 Docker box, but most Docker-ready boxes in the public repo are for Ubuntu. So I did a “vagrant up” to cause the box image to download and launch, connected to the Centos6 guest, and Docker-ized it using this handy resource: http://docs.docker.io/installation/rhel/
An alternative set of instructions:
http://cloudcounselor.com/2013/12/05/docker-0-7-redhat-centos-6-5/
The process is rather simple as long as you’re using the latest CentOS 6.5 release. Older kernels don’t have the necessary extensions, requiring a kernel upgrade first.
Step 3. Porting to Xen
Once docker was working, the challenge of getting the VM from VirtualBox to Xen presented itself. I was expecting a nightmare of fiddling with the disk image and generating a new initrd, but there was a pleasant surprise. All I had to do was convert the VM image from the “vmdk” format to a raw disk image, transfer the raw image to the Xen box, hack up a xen config and it booted right up!
The details:
On the Fedora desktop:
$ qemu-img convert -f vmdk virtualbox-centos6-containers.vmdk -O raw centos6-containers.img
$ rsync -avz --progress centos6-containers.img root@vmserver:/srv/xen/images/centos6-container/
File and directory names vary depending on your needs and preferences.
Now it’s time to connect to “vmserver”, which is my CentOS5 physical host.
I stole an existing XEN DomU pygrub-booting definition from another VM, changed the network and virtual disk definitions to provide a suitable environment. The disk definition itself looks like this:
disk = [ "tap:aio:/srv/xen/images/centos6-container/centos6-containers.img,xvda,w"]
xvda, incidentally is a standard Centos VM disk image, with a swap and LVM partition inside.
I launched the VM and behold! a Centos 6 Docker container DomU on a CentOS 5 Dom0 base.
Everything should be this easy.
