Creating a Stand-Alone Photon Machine With cloud-init

Cloud-init can customize a Photon OS virtual machine by using the nocloud data source. The nocloud data source bundles the cloud-init metadata and user data into an ISO that acts as a seed when you boot the machine. The seed.iso delivers the metadata and the user data without requiring a network connection.

Procedure

1. Create the metadata file with the following lines in the YAML format and name it meta-data:

   instance-id: iid-local01
      local-hostname: cloudimg
   

2. Create the user data file with the following lines in YAML and name it user-data:

     #cloud-config
     hostname: testhost
     packages:
      - vim
   

3. Generate the ISO that will serve as the seed. The ISO must have the volume ID set to cidata. In the following example, the ISO is generated on an Ubuntu 14.04 computer containing the files named meta-data and user-data in the local directory:

   genisoimage -output seed.iso -volid cidata -joliet -rock user-data meta-data
   

   The ISO now appears in the current directory:

   steve@ubuntu:~$ ls
   meta-data seed.iso user-data
   

4. Optionally, check the ISO that you generated on Ubuntu by transferring the ISO to the root directory of your Photon OS machine and then running the following command:

   cloud-init --file seed.iso --debug init
   

   After running the cloud-init command above, check the cloud-init log file:

   more /var/log/cloud-init.log
   

5. Attach the ISO to the Photon OS virtual machine as a CD-ROM and reboot it so that the changes specified by seed.iso take effect. In this case, cloud-init sets the hostname and adds the vim package.