PhotonOS Storage Appliance

This is a project to develop a Packer template to have an NFS server and S3 server provided by MinIO.

The OVA is based around Photon OS and can be built using Packer. It is based around the work by William Lam and Timo Sugliani.

The following Packer templates will build an OVA using a VMware vSphere ESXi host (although it is easily modifiable to build from VMware Workstation or Fusion) from a Photon 4.0 image. After the creation, the VM will be customizable using OVF parameters, so network, root password and Harbor configuration will be assignable during deployment. If no network is configured during deployment, it will use DHCP.

Requirements

A Linux or Mac environment (to be able to run the shell-local provisioner)
A VMware ESXi host to use as builder prepared for Packer using this guide
A DHCP-enabled network.
Packer 1.6.6
OVFTool installed and configured in your PATH.

Building

To build this template, you will need to edit the photonos-storage-appliance-builder.json file with your ESXi values:

{
  "builder_host": "packerbuild.sclab.local",
  "builder_host_username": "root",
  "builder_host_password": "VMware1!",
  "builder_host_datastore": "datastore1",
  "builder_host_portgroup": "VM Network"
}

Then run the photonos-storage-appliance.sh script or execute the following commands:

rm -f output-vmware-iso/*

packer build -var-file=photonos-storage-appliance-builder.json -var-file=photonos-storage-appliance-version.json -var-file=photonos-storage-appliance-version.json photonos-storage-appliance.json

Deployment parameters

The following network parameters can be configured when deploying the OVA in vSphere:

Value	Description	Default value
Hostname	Hostname for the VM.	photonos-storage-appliance
IP Address	IP address of the VM	(DHCP)
Netmask Prefix	Netmask in CIDR notation	(DHCP)
Gateway	Gateway of the VM	(DHCP)
DNS	DNS Server of the VM	(DHCP)
DNS Domain	DNS Domain of the VM	(DHCP)

The password for the root user must be configured on deployment:

Value	Description	Default value
Root Password	Password to log into the system as root user	Mandatory value

The following storage configuration parameters can be set during deployment:

Value	Description	Default value
NFS Data Volume size	Size of NFS data volume in GB	60 GB
MinIO Data Volume size	Size of MinIO data volume in GB	60 GB

An additional flag can be configured for virtual machine deployment debugging:

Value	Description	Default value
Debug	Enables logging to /var/log/photon-customization-debug.log	False

Storage parameters

After the VM boots, the NFS share will be available on /mnt/nfs, which can be verified by using:

root@storage [ ~ ]# showmount -e
Export list for storage:
/mnt/nfs *

MinIO will also be installed and available in the port 9000. It can be accessed in the URL http://YOUR-IP:9000 (where YOUR_IP is your selected IP, either static or set dynamically with DHCP):

MinIO username: minioadmin
MinIO password: minioadmin

Acknowledgements