红联Linux门户
Linux帮助

Hands-on: Linux appliances made easy with SUSE Studio

发布时间:2009-07-31 21:13:12来源:红联作者:刘冲
Hands-on: Linux appliances made easy with SUSE Studio Novellhas launched a new service called SUSE Studio that makes it easy tobuild software appliances. Ars gives it a spin and find it's anexcellent tool for building virtual appliances.
By Ryan Paul



Novellhas launched a new Web service called SUSE Studio that simplifies theprocess of building Linux-based software appliances. It provides aconvenient interface for creating custom versions of Novell's SUSELinux distribution with specialized configurations. The service is partof Novell's broader SUSE Appliance Program initiative.
Enterprise software deployment comes with a lot of serious technicalchallenges. Getting a complex piece of server software up and runningon backend infrastructure often requires system administrators towrestle with dependencies and configuration issues. Software appliancesare increasingly viewed as a compelling solution to this problem.

A software appliance is a preconfigured stack that includes asoftware program and its dependencies bundled with a minimal operatingsystem image that can get the program up and running with the smallestpossible resource footprint. This concept is often referred to as "JustEnough Operating System" (JeOS).
SUSE Studio allows users to build software appliances on top of SUSEEnterprise Linux or OpenSUSE. It offers several templates that can beused as a starting point, including a minimal JeOS template, a servertemplate, a minimal X11, KDE, and GNOME templates. After selecting abase template, users can customize it and add additional software.



SUSE Studio can output software appliances in several formats,making it easy to generate images that can be deployed on physicalhardware, virtualized environments, or cloud computing services. It canbuild virtual disks in the standard formats supported by VMware andXen, it can generate ISO files for making installable Live CDs, and itcan generate raw disk images that can be written directly to physicalhard drives or removable media such as USB thumb drives and SD cards.Novell says that support for Amazon EC2 images is coming soon.


SUSE Studio provides a simple and elegant Web interface forcustomizing the software that is bundled in the distro image. Users canbrowse and search the official SUSE repositories and select individualpackages that they wish to add. SUSE Studio will automatically computethe required dependencies and include those too. Users can also addadditional third-party repositories or upload their own SUSE-compatibleRPM files. As you add and remove packages, you will be able to see thedisk footprint of the appliance. This is particularly useful whenbuilding images for USB thumb drives or netbooks with limited drivecapacity.






In addition to being able to select custom package sets, users canalso upload their own files and specify where those should reside onthe generated filesystem. These are applied as an overlay, so it'spossible to selectively overwrite files that are included in variouspackages.
SUSE Studio provides a dashboard for customizing the appliance. Youcan specify network settings and default localization settings. It'salso possible to create system user accounts with specific passwordsand groups. If the appliance includes MySQL, you can upload a SQL dumpto populate the database with default content. It's even possible tocustomize appliance branding by setting a custom logo image andwallpaper.


After SUSE Studio generates an appliance, you can perform a livetest directly in your browser. This is possibly the most impressivefeature of SUSE Studio. When you click the test drive link for anappliance, SUSE Studio will run it in a remote virtualized environmentand display it to you in your browser window through an interactiveFlash VNC client. This allows you to test the appliance before youdownload and deploy it. The test drive feature has basic networkingsupport so that you can test Web applications that are running in theappliance.


The SUSE Studio user interface is extremely well-engineered. Thewhole experience is polished, intuitive, and painless. It's much easierthan working with Ubuntu's vmbuilder command line tool. It's alsoslightly better organized than rPath's rBuilder, which we looked at last year.
Novell developer Cornelius Schumacher has written a blog entrywith additional technical details about the service. He says that it'slargely a Ruby on Rails application that was built on top of SUSE'sKiwi command-line appliance tools. He also discusses some of the waysthat he is using it personally for appliance building.
"For my personal work Studio has become an important tool. I used itfor example to create the Marble Live CD, or for my hackweek project,the KDE SDK," he wrote. "It's also a nice way to try out software orcreate an updated openSUSE version, for example with the latest KDE."
SUSE Studio is a top-notch tool for building virtual appliances. Itshowcases the flexibility of the Linux platform and makes distrocustomization trivially easy. To take SUSE Studio for a spin, you can register at the website.
Further reading[list][*]Miguel de Icaza: SUSE Studio is out - The Linux Appliance Builder[*]Nat Friedman: SUSE Studio 1.0[/list]
文章评论

共有 0 条评论