VM Images

Talus uses Vagrant with the vagrant-libvirt provider to manage and configure VMs. Once a VM is configured and in the Talus system, libvirt will be directly used to start/stop/shutdown VMs on slave machines instead of Vagrant. Vagrant is solely a configuration tool.

Vagrant Benefits

Using Vagrant as the VM configurator allows Talus to easily reconfigure a VM before running a task. This is beneficial when needing to perform some updates on an image before running a task (e.g. to ensure that all products work with the latest vendor patches).

VM Configuration

Linux

Windows

Libvirt Requirements

The virtio drivers must be installed.

Vagrant Requirements

Talus will use WinRM (windows remote management).to configure the VM. This must be explicitly turned on inside the VM before uploading. Below are the steps you should take to configure a windows VM for working with Vagrant (mostly taken from “here”:https://github.com/WinRb/vagrant-windows#winrm-configuration):

winrm quickconfig -q
winrm set winrm/config/winrs @{MaxMemoryPerShellMB="512"}
winrm set winrm/config @{MaxTimeoutms="1800000"}
winrm set winrm/config/service @{AllowUnencrypted="true"}
winrm set winrm/config/service/auth @{Basic="true"}
sc config WinRM start= auto

Also note that all created networks in the VM must be set the “Work” network. This can be set to be the default action by going to:

Open "gpedit.msc" -> Go to Computer Configration –> Windows Settings –> Security Settings –> Network list manager

and setting the appropriate options

The above commands must be run in an Administrator shell. Also, the network must not be set to public (use Work/Private/whatev)

It may also help to attempt to shrink the size of the VM using sdelete

sdelete -z C:

Some additional tips specifically for VMWare Fusion “here”:http://codyburleson.com/2013/01/05/how-to-shrink-a-windows-vm-on-vmware-fusion-for-mac/