Mastering KVM Virtualization - Second Edition

Chapter 9: Customizing a Virtual Machine with cloud-init

Customizing a virtual machine often seems simple enough – clone it from a template; start; click a couple of Next buttons (or text tabs); create some users, passwords, and groups; configure network settings... That might work for a virtual machine or two. But what happens if we have to deploy two or three hundred virtual machines and configure them? All of a sudden, we're faced with a mammoth task – and it's a task that will be prone to errors if we do everything manually. We're wasting precious time while doing that instead of configuring them in a much more streamlined, automated fashion. That's where cloud-init comes in handy, as it can customize our virtual machines, install software ...