Sstrhsrtj

As I move to look at virtualbox for the small/medium business where I've used vmware previously, I'm interested in a proper kickstart for my RHEL5/6/7 hosts.

I'm used to using proper vmware guest RPMs I can pre-bake into the (packer) images - and I hope I don't need to list the benefits! - and while I see some RPMs for the actual host machines, I don't see anything for the guests.

Am I overlooking something? I want to believe that in the larger Oracle organization, who produces VBox and OEL, that the one hand does know what the other one is doing, and they've got the right bits to support their own enterprise products; I just haven't found it yet. If someone can point me to the installation artifacts they're using in their enterprise organization - preferably something with X stripped out - I'd be ever so grateful.

Thanks!

p.s.: A dev-ops tag may be best, here, but I can't find one.

I know this question is 4 years old, but I just stumbled upon it today and realized I was in your exact situation a couple years ago.

What we ended up doing was using a Packer definition to automate our image build process. Packer supports a guest_additions_url option. We pointed this to a local mirror with a copy of the guest additions iso. Keep in mind, however, that this just uploads the iso to a folder in the VM or inserts it into the virtual CD drive, depending on what other configuration options you've chosen. Installation is an exercise left to the user - usually a provisioning script will do the trick. We based our Packer definition on one from Chef's "Bento" repository, which uses a provisioning script to install guest additions after the iso has been copied into the VM:

#!/bin/sh -eux



# set a default HOME_DIR environment variable if not set

HOME_DIR="${HOME_DIR:-/home/vagrant}";



case "$PACKER_BUILDER_TYPE" in

virtualbox-iso|virtualbox-ovf)

    VER="`cat $HOME_DIR/.vbox_version`";

    ISO="VBoxGuestAdditions_$VER.iso";

    mkdir -p /tmp/vbox;

    mount -o loop $HOME_DIR/$ISO /tmp/vbox;

    sh /tmp/vbox/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run 

        || echo "VBoxLinuxAdditions.run exited $? and is suppressed." 

            "For more read https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12479";

    umount /tmp/vbox;

    rm -rf /tmp/vbox;

    rm -f $HOME_DIR/*.iso;

    ;;

esac

There are guest additions packages available in repositories for other distros, such as Ubuntu and Arch Linux, but for some reason the closest thing I've found available for RHEL/CentOS are sketchy websites offering up guest additions rpms for ad-hoc downloads, but no actual trustworthy repositories.

P.S. There is now a devops-specific Stack Exchange site.