Automate CentOS installation with VMware for testing

Question

Is is possible to automate the installation of an OS using VMware or any other virtualization product?

One of our products consists of a customized version of CentOS that installs the OS and our application on a server. It's much like any CentOS/RHEL installation where you choose a mode that corresponds to different kickstart options, and then you choose your keyboard type. The rest of the installation is automatic.

What I'd like to have is an automated system that will create a new guest VM, boot it with the ISO image of our product, start the installation (including choosing the keyboard), wait for the reboot, and then launch a set of automated tests.

I know that there are plenty of ways to automate the creation of new VM guests from existing templates/images, and I know you can use the VIX API to interact with virtual machines, but the VIX API seems to require that VMware tools is already running (which won't be the case when you're booting from the CentOS install disk).

This answer (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4684/automating-vmware-or-virtualpc/115997#115997) indicates that you can script VMware to boot from an ISO that does an unattended installation, but I would really like to test the same process that our customers will be using.

Another option might be to use Xen's fully-virtualized mode and see if scripting it over the serial port will work.

TIA, Jason

Answer 1

This may not be exactly what you need:

I have done something similar with a Ubuntu-based install. We used preseeding (Debian's form of kickstart), to answer all the questions during the install - providing the preseed file and the installer via tftp. In addition to the official Ubuntu mirror we added the apt-server with our own packages in the preseed file. We put a .deb version of vmware-tools on the apt-server and added it to the packages to be installed.

The .deb of vmware tools just contained the .tar.gz and a postinstall script that would extract it to /tmp and run the vmware install script (which has a switch to be run unnattended, so it does not ask any questions).

So after the reboot vmware-tools were up and running and we could use vix to script the rest (which was not very reliable). If you should encounter problems with running vmware-config.pl during boot, you could make a custom package that just extracts the tools and an init script that installs them on first boot, disables itself and reboots.

Maybe you can use this strategy (replacing apt by yum, preseed by kickstart and tftp by a remastered iso). If you really need to test that your users choose a keyboard in the installer (which is not very different from kickstart) this would obviously not work for you..

Answer 2

I have a very very similar question, it is on superuser:

http://superuser.com/questions/36047/moving-vmware-os-image-as-primary-os-on-a-system

Answer 3

You can also use VirtualBox instead of VMWare. The VirtualBox SDK allows you to directly control the keyboard, the mouse the serial port and the parallel port of the guest without the virtualbox guest tools installed.

Unfortunately it doesn't offer a text console interface but the serial port can be connected to a local pipe file and that can probably be worked with just as well.