jimtyhurst
commented
7 years ago I vote for item (4), because I want to use a development environment running in VirtualBox on a Mac. I have the HackOregonBase.ova image running after last night's installation workshop, but I would like to know more about how it was created, so that I can make modifications or at least suggest modifications in the future. My guess is that different teams will use different, but overlapping, sets of tools. One approach is to create an image that has all possible tools that any team would want. That requires a process by which people can request additions to the one canonical image. Another approach is to have a few customized images derived from a common base. I think your work or somebody's work on (4) would enable that second approach.
znmeb
I've got a few enhancements I want to make - opening this issue to get an idea who else would use them.
Running the OVA in Windows Hyper-V: I am probably going to do this for myself even if nobody else uses it since my Windows partition is set up with Hyper-V. If you have Windows 8, 8.1 or 10 Pro you probably have the Hyper-V capability. You need a 64-bit machine with the virtualization bits on the chip enabled in the BIOS. If you have those, look in Windows' "Add / Remove Windows Features" for Hyper-V.
There are two pieces to it. There's a Hyper-V manager that's like the VirtualBox GUI and there's the services part. There are two downsides to Hyper-V. First, you can't have Hyper-V and VirtualBox both running. And it's two reboots to switch Hyper-V on or off.
Second, you need two network connections for your guest to talk to the outside world. That is, the guest can't share the WiFi with the host. For our purposes a virtual switch inside the host that doesn't talk to the public internet is probably all we need.
The guest can share a wired connection though, and might be able to share a USB wireless NIC. I have a wireless device that plugs into the LAN port on my laptop and when I run Hyper-V I put the host on the WiFi and the guest on the LAN and magic happens. ;-) I also have a USB wireless NIC I can test.
My laptop has Hyper-V and there's no way I'm going back to VirtualBox. ;-)
Running the OVA in Linux' Virtual Machine Manager / libvirt: again, this is probably something I'm going to do for myself since my workstation and VirtualBox don't play together at all well. Unfortunately, there's no tested / documented way to go the other way ... build a virtual machine in Virtual Machine Manager and export it to VirtualBox / OVA.
Other Linux distros for native work: I've had one request for Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak", and I know there's only one minor issue with RStudio that would affect that. And Fedora 25 is coming out in a week or two - I'll probably do that for myself because they've been very responsive to my bug reports over the years and because I like their OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service. The nice thing about Linux is that you can run what you like on the desktop and anything else in a virtual machine. ;-)
Automating the Ubuntu install process in the OVA creation: I found the instructions for this here: http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/feature/Performing-an-automated-Ubuntu-install-using-preseeding. It looks straightforward but very detailed and time-consuming.
I doubt seriously if we're going to be using OVAs for anything beyond desktop data science and test environments. There are far better ways to deploy production servers; in fact, once we start to do that, there are fully automatable ways to grab deployed server images and run them in VirtualBox!