Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Upgrading Virtual Machine hardware versions using Kiwi

In this blog, I'm providing information on upgrading the VMWare Virtual machine hardware version. Also this VM is generated using the SuSe appliance build utility - KIWI.

What hardware versions in VM's mean?
Refer the links 
and

How to determine the current hardware version of a virtual machine ?
In the vSphere Client
  1) Click the virtual machine.
  2) Click the Summary tab.
  3) Find the hardware version in the VM Version field.

Upgrading hardware versions using VMWare utilities
 Refer the above mentioned links for this info.

Ugrading hardware versions in automated builds generated using kiwi (Suse Studio)
KIWI is an application for making a wide variety of image sets for Linux supported hardware platforms as well as virtualisation systems. 
We use Kiwi to build our virtual appliances. Kiwi builds appliances by referring a configuration file config.xml . To upgrade the VM machine HW version, you just need to make an entry to this config.xml file (source/config.xml  not bootsource/config.xml).

Your config.xml file may have a "vmwareconfig" section as shown below (in our case) and that describes the properties of a VM it is going to generate. Add desired HWversion field to this line as shown below (we upgraded from 4 to 7).


<vmwareconfig memory='4096' usb='true' arch='ix86' HWversion='7' guestOS='sles'>
    <vmwaredisk id='0' controller='scsi'/>
    <vmwarecdrom id='0' controller='ide'/>
    <vmwarenic mode='bridged' interface='0' driver='e1000'/>
 </vmwareconfig>

By default it was generating HW version 4 images. After adding HWversion='7', now it generated version 7 images for us. This is the working in our case.

If you don't find "vmwareconfig" section in your config.xml, then you need to deal it under "preferences" section as described in Kiwi cookbook. 

<machine arch="arch" memory="MB" HWversion="number" guestOS="suse|sles" domain="dom0|domU"/>
   <vmconfig-entry>Entry_for_VM_config_file<\vmconfig-entry>
   <vmconfig-entry .../>
   <vmnic driver="name" interface="number" mode="mode"/>
   <vmnic ...>
   <vmdisk controller="ide|scsi" id="number"/>
   <vmdvd controller="ide|scsi" id="number"/>
</machine>

Refer Kiwi cookbook for details.

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