Tom,
How difficult is it to produce these virtual installations?
I refer to my experiences in creating http://media.wu-wien.ac.at/download/vdotlrn. The difficulty is well limited, as you have options at hand:
- Create your own guest os appliance? The overall time factor is negligable, last time I did it, it was an effort of 30+ minutes. Of course, it depends, as you might consider some tweakings that should help keeping the disk footprint of the vbox as small as possible. Tweakings include:
- Special-purpose *nix distributions: Conservative approaches are bare-bone or server installations of recent distributions (Ubuntu server is 300mb+ unpacked). Once, I also used the Debian mini flavour which reduces storage needs to 100mb+). Lately, I came across JeOS, an Ubuntu flavour, that includes some kernel (and footprint) optimisations for the use as guest os. I don't have any experiences on the latter, but it might be worth a try (especially as they are optimised for the use in vmware environments).
- Manual clean-up after the vbox has been populated: Clear for temporary and cached data, installation and source files etc. One might also go for the manual removal of unneeded distribution elements.
- Archiving the entire vbox for delivery: Using 7z, I managed to reduce one of my Ubuntu/OACS vboxes to ~68mb (~500mb unpacked). This gives a quite impressive compression ratio ... (and makes even unoptimised vboxes suitable for delivery)
- Take a ready-made gues-os "appliance" and built on that: some examples are available from http://www.vmware.com/appliances/.
The installation of OACS/.LRN is not that an issue, time needs correpond to an ordinary installation. With the help of Malte's installation scripts (which could be tweaked a bit) it usually takes me another 30min+ on my machine to populate my vbox. After having done so, I came up with some extras which should turn the OACS/.LRN environment (and non-*nix users):
- Some pre-configured samba shares (e.g. packages directory of OACS, home dir etc.)
- A basic shell script to localise the vbox (keyboard settings, region and language, ...) in a guided manner
Overall, once the basic environment is established, tweaks are figured out, the efforts needed are really limited for the somewhat experienced OACS/.LRN geek to come up with up-to-date releases.
[...] but it shouldn't be difficult to build this with a simple script unless the VMWare folks complicate things.
to the best of my knowledge, there is no scripting environment for production/deployment of vboxes availabe (i.e. in the sense of the vmware authoring environments). this does not mean that the overall effort can not be substantially automated but not beyond what is done by e.g. Malte's script suite, I fear ... some remains handicraft.
Btw., you find a pointer to create your own images without any vmware authoring environment (as the server console, workstation etc.) at http://media.wu-wien.ac.at/download/vdotlrn.
Hope I could shed some light on the perceived complexity ...
