The Eucalyptus Imaging Service, introduced in Eucalyptus 4.0, makes it easier to deploy
EBS images in your Eucalyptus cloud and automates many of the labor-intensive processes
required for uploading data into EBS images.
The
Eucalyptus Imaging Service is implemented as
a system-controlled "worker" virtual machine that is monitored and controlled via Auto
Scaling. Once the Imaging Service is configured, the Imaging Service VM will be started
automatically upon the first request that requires it: such as an EBS volume ingress.
Specifically, in this release of
Eucalyptus,
these are the usage scenarios for the
Eucalyptus
Imaging Service:
- Importing a raw disk image as a volume: If you have a raw disk image
(containing either a data partition or a full operating system with a boot
record, e.g., an HVM image), you can use the Imaging Service to import this into
your Eucalyptus cloud as a volume. This
is accomplished with the euca-import-volume command. If the volume was populated
with a bootable disk, that volume can be snapshotted and registered as an
image.
- Importing a raw disk image as an instance: If you have a raw disk image
containing a bootable operating system, you can import this disk image into Eucalyptus as an instance: the Imaging
Service automatically creates a volume, registers the image, and launches an
instance from the image. This is accomplished with the euca-import-instance
command, which has options for specifying the instance type and the SSH key for
the instance to use.
Troubleshooting Imaging Worker
If the Imaging Worker is configured correctly, users will be able to import data into
EBS volumes with euca-import-* commands, and paravirtual EMIs will run
as instances. In some cases, though, paravirtual images may fail to convert (e.g., due
to intermittent network failures or a network setup that doesn't allow the Imaging
Worker to communicate with the CLC), leaving the images in a special state. To
troubleshoot:
-
If the Imaging Worker Instance Type does not provide sufficient
disk space for converting all paravirtual images, the administrator
may have to change the Instance Type used by the Imaging Worker.
After changing the instance type, the Imaging Worker instance should
be restarted by terminating the old Imaging Worker instance:
euctl services.imaging.worker.instance_type=m2.2xlarge
euca-terminate-instances $(euca-describe-instances --filter tag-value=euca-internal-imaging-workers | grep INSTANCE | cut -f 2)
-
If the status of the conversion operation is 'Image conversion failed', but the image is
marked as 'available' (in the output of euca-describe-images), the
conversion can be retried by running the EMI again: