Windows Contextualization, any guides on how this works?

Community Support
1

I’m circling back to OpenNebula after a few years using VRA and given the recent excitement with Broadcom now feels like a good time to be shopping around for a new VM front end.

I support R&D users, no production, nothing internet facing. So my needs are simple apart from the fact I need to support Windows workloads. About 60-70% of my workloads are Windows. I’d solved the post deployment config issues in VRA by using Cloudbase-init and it worked like a charm.

I understand OpenNebula has it’s own ‘agent’. And this is where my problems start. I feel like I’m missing something when it comes to Windows Contextualization.

I’ve been Googling trying to find a good guide on how it works but there’s a lot of dead links and a search of this forum didn’t quite get me the idiots guide I feel I need.

So I start here-

https://docs.opennebula.io/6.10/management_and_operations/references/kvm_contextualization.html

Which basically just says install the msi package.

So I then go here -

https://github.com/OpenNebula/one-apps/releases

Release page states it only supports Windows 10,11,2022. It’s not clear to me whether that’s because those are the only platforms it’s been tested on or whether there’s something about those newer releases which means it doesn’t work on Windows Server 2016/2019 (which are still in support) the github page doesn’t state either way.

The install instructions on that github page point to a dead link -

http://docs.opennebula.org/stable/operation/vm_setup/context_overview.html

And then “For beta releases, refer to the latest” also is a dead link -

http://docs.opennebula.org/devel/operation/vm_setup/context_overview.html

In the mainline Open Nebula docs, there’s this, but it’s a bit light on actual detail and doesn’t mention Windows at all.

https://docs.opennebula.io/6.10/management_and_operations/references/kvm_contextualization.html

What I need to be able to do is a final customisation of the VM after it’s deployed from a template so I need some means of getting commands to that VM.

Thanks.

2

The windows context package is tested regularly on windows2022, windows10 and windows11 images. We used to have the test run exclusively on a windows2012 image, but that is EOL. If you take a look a the windows issues in one-apps you’ll find the appliances we want to test. As it stands the context package works on older windows versions, we just can’t guarantee every feature works since it is not regularly tested at the moment.

Regarding how to use it, you can check the one-apps wiki windows section. The process of setting a Windows image up is detailed in this KB article.

1 Like
3

Perfect, thank you, apprecate the quick reply!