SLES 16 has been released. In the past, SUSE offered ready built vagrant images. Unfortunately that’s not the case anymore, as with more recent SLES15 releases the official images were gone.

In the past, it was possible to clone existing projects on the opensuse build service to build the images by yourself, but i couldn’t find any templates for SLES 16.

Naturally, there are several ways to build images, and the tooling around involves kiwi-ng, opensuse build service, or packer recipes etc.. (existing packer recipes wont work anymore, as Yast has been replaced by a new installer, called agma). All pretty complicated, …

So my current take on creating a vagrant image for SLE16 has been the following:

• Spin up an QEMU virtual machine
• Manually install the system, all in default except for one special setting: In the Network connection details, “Edit Binding settings” and set the Interface to not bind a particular MAC address or interface. This will make the system pick whatever network device naming scheme is applied during boot.
• After installation has finished, shutdown.

Two guestfs-tools that can now be used to modify the created qcow2 image:

• run virt-sysrpep on the image to wipe settings that might cause troubles:

 virt-sysprep -a sles16.qcow2

• create a simple shellscript that setups all vagrant related settings:

#!/bin/bash
useradd vagrant
mkdir -p /home/vagrant/.ssh/
chmod 0700 /home/vagrant/.ssh/
echo "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEA6NF8iallvQVp22WDkTkyrtvp9eWW6A8YVr+kz4TjGYe7gHzIw+niNltGEFHzD8+v1I2YJ6oXevct1YeS0o9HZyN1Q9qgCgzUFtdOKLv6IedplqoPkcmF0aYet2PkEDo3MlTBckFXPITAMzF8dJSIF
o9D8HfdOV0IAdx4O7PtixWKn5y2hMNG0zQPyUecp4pzC6kivAIhyfHilFR61RGL+GPXQ2MWZWFYbAGjyiYJnAmCP3NOTd0jMZEnDkbUvxhMmBYSdETk1rRgm+R4LOzFUGaHqHDLKLX+FIPKcF96hrucXzcWyLbIbEgE98OHlnVYCzRdK8jlqm8tehUc9c9W
hQ== vagrant insecure public key" > /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 0600 /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys
chown -R vagrant:vagrant /home/vagrant/
# apply recommended ssh settings for vagrant boxes
SSHD_CONFIG=/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/99-vagrant.conf
if [[ ! -d "$(dirname ${SSHD_CONFIG})" ]]; then
    SSHD_CONFIG=/etc/ssh/sshd_config
    # prepend the settings, so that they take precedence
    echo -e "UseDNS no\nGSSAPIAuthentication no\n$(cat ${SSHD_CONFIG})" > ${SSHD_CONFIG}
else
    echo -e "UseDNS no\nGSSAPIAuthentication no" > ${SSHD_CONFIG}
fi
SUDOERS_LINE="vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL"
if [ -d /etc/sudoers.d ]; then
    echo "$SUDOERS_LINE" >| /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant
    visudo -cf /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant
    chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant
else
    echo "$SUDOERS_LINE" >> /etc/sudoers
    visudo -cf /etc/sudoers
fi
 
mkdir -p /vagrant
chown -R vagrant:vagrant /vagrant
systemctl enable sshd

• use virt-customize to upload the script into the qcow image:

 virt-customize -a sle16.qcow2 --upload vagrant.sh:/tmp/vagrant.sh

• execute the script via:

 virt-customize -a sle16.qcow2 --run-command "/tmp/vagrant.sh"

After this, use the create-box.sh from the vagrant-libvirt project to create an box image:

https://github.com/vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt/blob/main/tools/create_box.sh

and add the image to your environment:

 create_box.sh sle16.qcow2 sle16.box
 vagrant box add --name my/sles16 test.box

the resulting box is working well within my CI environment as far as i can tell.