Building a disk image

In this guide we’ll show you how to turn a Vorteil project into a virtual disk image file.

Before you start

If you do not already have a Vorteil project available to follow this guide with, download a package from apps.vorteil.io and unpack it to create a project:

wget -O helloworld.vorteil https://apps.vorteil.io/file/vorteil/helloworld
vorteil unpack ./helloworld.vorteil ./helloworld

Building the disk image

Building a virtual machine disk image from a project is easy. Just provide the path to the Vorteil project as an argument when running the build command:

$ vorteil images build helloworld/
Build [=============================================================] 100.00% 0s
created image: helloworld.vmdk

NOTE: this action can be performed on Vorteil package files, too!

Build different disk images

This command will create “helloworld.vmdk” – a virtual disk image – from the project. Depending upon the ultimate purpose of the image, you might prefer to build a disk image format other than VMDK. To choose a specific image format add the --format=FORMAT flag to the command. Supported values for the --format flag include:

• vmdk
• fixed-vhd and dynamic-vhd
• ova
• raw
• gcp
• xva

Example:

$ vorteil images build helloworld/ --format=raw

Hypervisor drivers for manual VM creation

When creating a machine manually in any of the hypervisors or hypervisor managers (VMware vSphere, QEMU, VirtualBox etc), the most performant drivers have been selected.

As an example, for any VirtualBox VM creation the following drivers need to be selected:

• Network driver: virtio-net-pci
• Storage drive: virtio-scsi-pci

For VMware:

• Virtual Disk Type: SCSI
• SCSI Controller: Paravirtualized-scsi
• Edit the VM’s .vmx file and change ethernet0.virtualDev to contain the value vmxnet3.