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Revision as of 11:08, 12 November 2010 by Goldmann (talk | contribs) (updated Detailed Description section)


Feature Name BoxGrinder

Summary

Owner

  • Email: mgoldman@redhat.com

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 15
  • Last updated: 2010-11-12
  • Percentage of completion: 60%


Detailed Description

BoxGrinder is a set of tools used for building appliances (virtual machines) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2).

BoxGrinder creates appliances (images/virtual machines) from simple plain text Appliance Definition Files. There are only two simple steps to create an appliance:

  1. Create Appliance Definition File
  2. Run BoxGrinder. BoxGrinder will download all necessary artifact, build the instance, convert it to selected platform and upload it to selected destination. All in one process!

See Quick start page for more info.

Appliance definition file

Example appliance definition file:

name: f13-basic
summary: Just Enough Operating System based on Fedora 13
os:
  name: fedora
  version: 13
hardware:
  partitions:
    "/":
      size: 2
packages:
  includes:
    - @core

BoxGrinder Build architecture

BoxGrinderBuild-architecture.png

How it works

BoxGrinder Build has a plugin architecture. We can distinguish three types:

  1. Operating System plugins – generating base appliance for selected OS,
  2. Platform plugins – creating converted base appliance for selected platform (VMware, EC2),
  3. Delivery plugins – designed to deliver your new appliance to a specified location. For example as a tar file to a remote server or just register as AMI on EC2.

Benefit to Fedora

Scope

How To Test

User Experience

Dependencies

Contingency Plan

Documentation

Release Notes

Comments and Discussion