2 Replies Latest reply on Dec 22, 2011 10:09 AM by hagis

    Appliance for ESX is large (in GBs)

    hagis

      Hello all boxgrinders.

       

      Now I have succesfully built an appliance that I will use at several different sites to support Apple mac clients. It works like a charm! But now to my question.

       

      During development I have used Virtualbox for testing and verifying of functions. Now as the last step I need to make sure that the appliance works as expected in an ESX environement. So I build with this switch:

       

      boxgrinder-build netbooter.appl -p vmware --platform-config type:enterprise

       

      To generate a ESX image.

       

      Now to my question:

       

      The resulting raw image is super large (16 Gb). Is this expected? Can I set it to compress in any way?

       

      ls -Rlh build/appliances/i686/centos/5/netbooter/1.0/

       

      build/appliances/i686/centos/5/netbooter/1.0/centos-plugin:

      total 1.5G

      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 16G Dec  5 14:53 netbooter-sda.raw

      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 462 Dec  5 14:48 netbooter.xml

       

      build/appliances/i686/centos/5/netbooter/1.0/virtualbox-plugin:

      total 1.2G

      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.2G Dec  5 14:56 netbooter.vmdk

       

      build/appliances/i686/centos/5/netbooter/1.0/vmware-plugin:

      total 1.2G

      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  16G Dec  5 16:18 netbooter.raw

      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  381 Dec  5 16:18 netbooter.vmdk

      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.3K Dec  5 16:18 netbooter.vmx

      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  403 Dec  5 16:18 README

       

      Env:

       

      Fedora 15 (installed from netinstall iso)

      vanilla boxgrinder-build from repo: BoxGrinder Build 0.9.8

       

      part of appl file:

       

      hardware:

        partitions:

          "/":

            size: 15

        • 1. Re: Appliance for ESX is large (in GBs)
          goldmann

          H Håkan,

           

          When the plugin was created I got the info that ESX thin disk support is only available as a filesystem feature, not the disk image format itself. Maybe it has changed since then.

           

          It seems that ESX support also personal disks, so you can use it in your case. One of our community members crafted this tutorial. In your case use:

           

          boxgrinder-build netbooter.appl -p vmware --platform-config type:personal,thin_disk:true
          

           

          And please, let us know if it booted correctly, thanks!

           

          --Marek

          • 2. Re: Appliance for ESX is large (in GBs)
            hagis

            Hello Marek and thank you for the tip, it creates a nice small portable file instead of the initial raw 16Gb file.

             

            And it boots nicely in an ESXi environement. So thanks again for taking your time!