Hi All, We have been working on a feature that simplifies SystemVM template install and upgrades for CloudStack. Historically we've required users to seed the template on secondary storage during fresh installation and register the template before an upgrade - this really does not make CloudStack turnkey, as we end up maintaining and managing them as a separate component - for example, users can't simply do an apt-get upgrade or yum upgrade to upgrade CloudStack.
The feature works by automatically initiating registration of the SystemVM templates during upgrades or when the first secondary storage is added to a zone where the SystemVM template hasn't been seeded. This feature addresses several operational pain points for example, when the admin user forgets to register the SystemVM template prior to an upgrade and faces the issue of having to roll back the database midway during the upgrade process. With this feature the upgrade process is seamless, such that the end users do not need to worry about having to perform template registration, but rather have the upgrade process take care of everything that is required. In order to facilitate this feature, the SystemVM templates have to be bundled with the cloudstack-management rpm/deb package which causes the total noredist cloudstack-management package size to increase to about 1.6GB. We currently are packaging templates of only the three widely supported hypervisors - KVM, XenServer/XCP-ng and VMWare. (These templates are only packaged if the build is initiated with the noredist flag.) We'd like to get your opinion on this idea. Thanks & Regards, Pearl Dsilva
