This virtual appliance is ideal of you want to deploy a CentOS server. It’s only about 600MB compressed as I only included the defaults packages in a CentOS minimal installation. I also did some basic best practice configuration to make it more secure . Of course I could have hardened it a lot more, but I wanted to keep it easy to deploy an use.
It’s an ovf file, so you can use it with pretty much any hypervisor, including VMware, Virtual Box, Xenserver and Hyper-V.
To login, use the following credentials :
user : root
password : secure
To download my CentOS 5.5 x64 virtual appliance, use one of the followings links :
CentOS 5.5 64 bits withouts VMware Tools
CentOs 5.5 64 bits with VMware tools
Here are the details of the configuration :
- Installed only the defaults packages
- Modified the default partionnning :
- lv_root / 8GB
- lv_tmp 1.5 GB /tmp
- lv_log 1.5 GB /var/log
- lv_swap 1GB swap
- Updated the packages (may 19 2010)
- To increase performance, added divider=10 to the boot parameters
- Disabled the useless services (note that you will need to enable some of the services if for example you want to run an NFS server) :
- cups
- bluetooth
- sendmail
- 0213456 nfslock
- anacron
- isdn
- haldaemon
- messagebus
- gpm
- netfs
- mdmonitor
- 0126 acpid
- anacron
- pcscd
- hidd
- portmap
- rpcidmapd
- rpcgssd
- autofs
- avahi-daemon
- firstboot
- cpuspeed
- smartd
- yum-updatesd
- avahi-daemon
- avahi-dnsconfd
- conman
- mdmonitor
- Disabled ctrl-alt-del reboot in /etc/inittab
- Added noexec,nodev,nosuid to the mount option of /tmp
- Modified PS1 so that your prompt will appear in red when you are logged as root
- Removed port 50,51 and 631 from the default open ports in iptables, leaving only port 22 and ping request open.
9 juin 2010 at 18 h 26 min
Any comments on what to improve in this virtual appliance would be welcome!
14 juin 2010 at 8 h 54 min
Thank you for this virtual machine archive.
I would appreciate if it were executable with VMware Player (*.wmx configuration file).
14 juin 2010 at 21 h 19 min
Good idea. I will add it this week when I get time.
16 juin 2010 at 3 h 32 min
This is the report of my test.
My host is Windows XP Pro SP3 4GB 32bits with T9300 64 bit VT enabled processor. I validated the bios setup for hardware virtualization.
Both VMware-player-3.0.1-227600 and latest VirtualBox fail to run it.
Its boots with VMware Workstation 7.1 (hardware compatibility version 6.5.7) configuring a new guest with 512MB RAM, NAT, and using the virtual disk to the guest. The boot process asks to override the readonly restriction when it checks the filesystem. Boot stalls a few minutes starting system logger and then continues to login. Network went not up; it seems not having recognized the network virtual device, complaining that the eth0 device MAC address differs than the one expected. Guest operating system deamon went not up.
Keyboard is querty. I will look for the centos command to customize it.
16 juin 2010 at 6 h 54 min
It defenetively works with VirtualBox and VMware Player, I tested it before posting this.
Did you import it in VirtualBox or you just tryed to run it ? If you just tryed to run it, good are the chance that it won’t work.
Yes the keyboard is querty, this is intended.
16 juin 2010 at 8 h 15 min
depositfiles really sucks. I started downloading this file, but > 3 hours for a file this small? And I have to pay a hefty fee to get it in 9 minutes? I think 9 minutes is still slow, so there is no way I will spend my money there… Sorry. I’ll rather build the image myself. It will be faster than downloading the file!
16 juin 2010 at 13 h 38 min
Instead of complaining, do you have any recommendation on where to host it ?
17 juin 2010 at 2 h 33 min
Thanks for the VM.
You think I can use it for Cassandra testing using the current hardening state?
17 juin 2010 at 3 h 14 min
I have never looked at file hosting services as such, as I have my private web site on a hosting service that has enough capacity for me.
Do you have the time and interest to set up a project around this? Minimal CentOS VM? I guess you could then use SourceForge or something similar to host everything. You could even get collaborators to help maintain it.
My thought is a minimal VM with a few changes from yours.
- It should have US keyboard by default, but perhaps a firstboot-style script that asks for keyboard type.
- Somehow detect (or ask) what kind of VM environment it is running on, and offer to install client tools automagically instead of having VMware tools by default.
- set up ntp. This is recommended by vmware. I would even comment out the hardware clock as fallback for ntp.
Make it as standard as possible so people know they get a quite default CentOS, and have it listed at centos.org and vmware.com.
17 juin 2010 at 13 h 13 min
@Ziv I dont’t really know what Cassandra is, so I can’t give an answer to that question.
@birger I tought about hosting the file myself, but the bandwitdh is expansive and I can’t really afford that.
I’ll see if I can host it sourceforge or something else.
I prefer not to add any script in this VA, I want it to have only stuff that come from CentOS.
As for NTP, I’ill configure it in a future future.
Thank you!
30 juin 2010 at 12 h 41 min
password secure is not really working here. ESXi
30 juin 2010 at 12 h 46 min
It’s working. Rembember, the keyboard is qwerty.
30 juin 2010 at 13 h 41 min
yes, you’re right. thanks! very good appliance, working good on my ESXi. i will perform some benchmark tests and post the results here later.
26 juillet 2010 at 23 h 15 min
Ill consider hosting the file for you.
how many downloads a day / month do you get now?
2 août 2010 at 20 h 24 min
Hello Nick,
I don’t have any specific stats regarding the numbers of downloads. I would not think it’s that much.
According to my Google Analytics I got 1800 visits in july on this web page.
Let’s say that 10% people actually download it, so that would means around 180dl/month or 6dl/day.
Sorry if it took me so long to answer, I was away.
3 août 2010 at 19 h 47 min
before shutting down the appliance have you tried clearing the unused disk space?
I.e. dd if=/dev/zero of=delete.me;rm delete.me
(If you are using a growable virtual disk then limit the block size and
count so you don’t fully expand: bs=4096 count=10000)
I suggest that you try using p7zip and see what affect that has (I’m comparing a distro now and it seems to have helped a lot).
AFAIK you can’t run a 64 bit virtual machine on 32 bit Windows so Alian is out of luck (you might highlight that point).
3 août 2010 at 19 h 58 min
Hello William, thank you for your comment.
No I didn’t clear anything, It’s not needed since I did not not to delete any file in the appliance.
Will try with 7zip but I don’t expect it to make much of a difference.
You can run a 64 bits virtual machine on a 32 bits hosts with Virtual Box. htp://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch03.html#intro-64bitguests