Editing Context options of a template

NOTE:

There is a specific documentation page to explain more about the concepts of Contextualisation.

Contextualisation on this page refers to what information is made available from OpenNebula to your VM. It is up to your VM to take this information and do something useful with it. Some packages exist for certain operating systems that may help, such as a .deb or an .rpm version.

You can personalise the way you want contextualisation applied to your VM. The options are split into 4 subsections:

• Network & SSH: to configure contextualisation aspects related to network and SSH
• Files: to include files in the contextualisation CD-ROM
• User Inputs: to require the user to fill in values upon VM creation
• Custom vars: to add variables to the contextualisation file on the CD-ROM

Network & SSH options

Under the Network & SSH subsection, you can choose to:

• enable/disable the contextualisation features for SSH
  • If you enable the tick-box and you paste a public key on the Public Key box, then this public key will become available on the VM and you will be able to log into your VM with the private-public key pair for that public key. If you enable the tick-box but leave the Public Key box empty on the template, then the VM will receive the user’s Public SSH Key.
• enable/disable the contextualisatation features for networking
  • If you enable the Add Network Contextualization check-box, then the contextualisation file on the CD-ROM will include configuration parameters for the nics defined in the template.
• enable/disable OneGate
  • If you enable the Add OneGate token check-box, then OpenNebula will assign a token-value to your VM and make that value available on the contextualisation file. Programs in your VM can then use this token to communicate information to OpenNebula.

NOTE:

Our first release of OpenNebula has OneGate not enabled.

Files options

On the user view, under the Virtual Resources menu, there is an item called Files & Kernels. You can create files of Type Context there. Then, you can link them to the template you are editing under the Files subsection of the Context tab. These files will then be made available on the contextualisation CD-ROM so that the VM can access them, and you can use them in your programs on your VM right away.

Alternatively, or at the same time, on the FILES_DS field you can write the raw line that should be copied into the template describing files to include.

The Init scripts field allows you to specify scripts (programs) that must be run on the VM when the operating system within your VM is booting. You can specify several of them and in which order like: init.sh set_up_my_user.sh set_up_my_web_server.sh

User Inputs options

You can add a list of variables you want to ask the user to fill in when she creates a VM out of the template you are editing. When she instantiates the template, a form will pop-up asking her to fill the variables you have specified. The values she provides will become available in the contextualisation CD-ROM as ⟨key, value⟩ pairs.

Custom vars options

You pre-define extra ⟨key, value⟩ pairs of your own that will be included in the contextualisation CD-ROM.