Redhat-developer

Redhat Developer

Sign up for a No-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux Individual Developer Subscription, https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux#general this gives licences to use RHEL9, Redhat insights etc.

Building Hosts and deploying on ESXi without vSphere

Go to Redhat Insights https://console.redhat.com/insights/ and create a Blueprint (Inventory -> Images -> Blueprint) chose the Image Output to be VMware vSphere - Virtual Disk (vmdk) use this Blueprint to generate an Image https://console.redhat.com/insights/image-builder

Download the vmdk, copy to the ESXi storage.

The images have a fat 4GB disk, at this point its worth turning that into a thin provisioned disk

• Enable SSH on the ESXi host
• SSH in and cf to `/vmfs/volumes` follow the symlink to to the storage these master images are kept, and into their folder
• Make a copy of the disk that is thin provisioned

vmkfstools -i rhel9-20240531.vmdk rhel9-20240531-thin.vmdk -d 'thin'

Generate userdata and metadata

On a secure host, create userdata.yaml

#cloud-config
users:
- name: myusername
  sudo: "ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL"
  ssh_authorized_keys:
  - ssh-ed25519 PUBLIC_KEY mykey@home.com

create metadata.yaml

instance-id: cloud-vm
local-hostname: rhel9-image

Copy the base64-gzip versions of the two config files to a safeplace

Generate metadata from cli with the correct hostname (replace rhel9-image with hostname)

echo METADATA= && echo "instance-id: cloud-vm\nlocal-hostname: rhel9-image" | gzip | base64

echo METADATA= && gzip -c9 <metadata.yaml | { base64 -w0 2>/dev/null || base64; }
echo USERDATA= && gzip -c9 <userdata.yaml | { base64 -w0 2>/dev/null || base64; }

They can be checked by reversing the process

echo "H4sIAAt2SWcCA8vMKy5JzEtO1c1MsVJIzskvTdEty+XKyU9OzNHNyC8uyUvMTbVSKMpIzbHUzcxNTE/lAgABQg8LMgAAAA"  | base64 -d | gunzip
instance-id: cloud-vm
local-hostname: rhel9-image
gunzip: truncated input

Create a new VM

• Generate a new VM, remove all harddisks.
• Once the VM has been created, copy the vmdk to the new VM's folder.
• Attach the disk to the VM
• Edit -> VM Options -> Advanced -> Edit Configuration, add the following keys and values
  • guestinfo.metadata.encoding=gzip+base64
  • guestinfo.userdata.encoding=gzip+base64
  • guestinfo.metadata=${METADATA} <from step above>
  • guestinfo.userdata=${USERDATA} <from step above>

SAVE

Remember to go back and expand the harddisk

Boot the VM, the user will be created and the VM will be registered with RHEL Insights

Find the IP Address from the ESXi GUI. ssh in and have a coffee

Rename the host

If you were lazy and used the metadata file from another build, rename the host

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname new.host
sudo init 6