Ubuntu has outdone themselves once again, and made building Virtual Machines even faster and easier. If you enjoyed using Jeos to build simple, fast efficient VM’s. Then you are going to love their new tool. This tool will allow you to not only build Ubuntu Jeos VM’s, Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Desktop, but has the potential, with plugins, to support a wide range of linux distributions in the near future regardless of it being rpm or deb based.

VMworld was my first opportunity to get out and meet the people which read my blog on a regular basis. One of these people I sat down and had a few minutes with was Nick Barcet, of Canonical (you know, those guys who do Ubuntu). He was nice enough to show me the future of my favorite Ubuntu project. After writing many articles last spring, around the release of 8.04 about Jeos it hurt me to have him tell me they are removing Jeos Iso from the 8.10 repositories. But, their reasons are very valid, and after seeing what they are replacing it with, I think it is a wise decision.

Here is the reason for the change, direct from Ubuntu:

With vmbuilder, there is no need to download a JeOS iso anymore. vmbuilder will fetch the various package and build a virtual machine tailored for our need in about a minute for us. Vmbuilder is a Script that automates the process of creating a ready to use Linux based VM. (source)

My Additional input and thoughts:
When I first came across Ubuntu Jeos, I was hooked. It really made sense, and I loved everything about it. Except the install process. Where it was quick, but not instant, and often in early betas wouldn’t complete. I will say that had I done a little more work in scripting the install with netboot script it wouldn’t have been so bad, but live and learn. But now the python-vm-builder will go from script initialization to booting the VM in under 2 minutes for a minimal configuration using a local repository.

Additionally, there was a great deal of confusion in the Ubuntu support forums. They saw the Jeos ISO, and many many many times I saw people asking how to install it onto their bare metal system to load VMware Server ON TOP of it!! This wasn’t a rare problem, but due to lack of clear examples and documentation online I could see why someone might want to try and use Jeos as the host OS. If you look at VMware ESXi, it makes sense, put as little OS as possible between the hardware and virtualization layer.

I needed to clarify a few key points when researching this post, so I followed up with a quick e-mail to Nick directly, these are the highlights as follows:

Myself: I have scanned the 8.10 repos, and found 2 projects and ubuntu-vm-builder (0.6) and python-vm-builder (0.9-0ubuntu1) which is the correct version?

Nick: Python-vm-builder is indeed the new version, which replaced ubuntu-vm-builder in 8.10.

Myself: I thought you had mentioned to me that they are renaming it, to get a broader adoption across the Linux community. Can it, or will it be able to build any distribution such as suse or redhat, or is it limited to Ubuntu based versions, such as kubuntu and edubuntu?

Nick: At the moment, it is able to build any Ubuntu based distro which are in Ubuntu’s repositories (including all official flavors), but has been rewritten so that distro specific code is inside of a plugin so that anyone can easily add its own plugin for another distro, regardless of it being rpm, deb or whatever based.

Myself: What is the recommended use of the tool? Should it be run in a VM and which has access to write to the host? Should it be run on the host itself? Or should it be run on a regular workstation and then have the files transferred to the host?

Nick: All 3 scenarios you describe are possible, as long as they are all ubuntu based as, for now, it only has been packaged for Ubuntu.

Myself: Currently you said it is a python command line program, but mentioned the possibility of a web interface. What is the time frame for the web interface, will this become a stand alone VM, an ISO or a standalone custom apache module?

Nick: The web interface should be available somewhere along the 9.04 release.

Just for anyone else still reading:
Here is the highlights from the 09/09/2008 Meeting log, concerning Python-VM-Builder:

[16:08] <MootBot> ACTION received: sommer to update the virtualization section of the server guide with references to the new ubuntu-vm-builder
[16:08] <sommer> soren: yep, sorry I just wasn’t sure last week what package to use
[16:09] <soren> sommer: Ah, yes. I remember something about that. It’s all sorted now, right?
[16:09] <mathiaz> The new package is called vm-builder
[16:09] <sommer> soren: should be good to go
[16:09] <mathiaz> and the source package name is actually python-vm-builder
[16:10] <mathiaz> soren: is there anything else to report wrt to vm-builder ?
[16:12] <soren> Nope.
[16:12] <mathiaz> ok. Let’s move on

Major source of information Regarding the use of Python-VM-Builder:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/JeOSVMBuilder

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