Introduction to Creating VM Templates with QEMU

This document contains a general guideline for creating VM Templates on systems with QEMU installed. It is designed to help you get started, because the specific commands will vary from one installation to another. Abiquo recommends that you use QEMU on KVM for performance reasons.

Create a new hard disk in qcow2 format. In this example, a 5GB hard disk is used.

# qemu-img create -f qcow2 disk.qcow2 5G

The following command will start the virtual machine with 256MB booting from a CD-ROM image linux.iso. Adjust these settings to your needs during installation.
You can readjust the memory assigned later when uploading the image to Abiquo.

# qemu-system-x86_64 -hda disk.qcow2 -cdrom linux.iso -boot d -m 256

Proceed with installation, customize the system to your requirements and halt. The qcow2 image is now ready to be uploaded to Abiquo.

Abiquo supports VIRTIO disk and network controllers on KVM.

Of course, you could also upload the ISO disk to Abiquo and use it to create new virtual machines!