Introduction

Depending on your environment you can follow one of the options to create RHCOS (CoreOS) image in PowerVC

Option-1

  1. Download the RHCOS image from the following link on a system with public internet access. You'll need a way to transfer this image to a RHEL VM that you'll create in the next step.
  2. Login to PowerVC and create a RHEL 8.x VM having an additional empty volume with minimum size of 120G. Please make a note of the new volume name.
  3. Login to the VM and execute the following steps
  4. Install wget, qemu-img, parted and gzip packages
  5. Transfer the downloaded RHCOS image to this VM
  6. Extract the image $ gunzip rhcos-openstack.ppc64le.qcow2.gz
  7. Convert the CoreOS qcow2 image to raw image $ qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O raw rhcos-openstack.ppc64le.qcow2 rhcos-latest.raw
  8. Identify the disk device representing the additional empty volume attached to the VM $ disk_device_list=$(sudo parted -l 2>&1 | grep -E -v "$readonly" | grep -E -i "ERROR:" |cut -f2 -d: | grep -v "Can't" | xargs -i echo "Disk.{}:|" | xargs echo | tr -d ' ' | rev | cut -c2- | rev) $ empty_disk_device=$(sudo fdisk -l | grep -E "$disk_list" | sort -k5nr | head -n 1 | tail -n1 | cut -f1 -d: | cut -f2 -d' ') $ echo "$empty_disk_device"'

  9. Dump the raw image to the newly added disk $ dd if=rhcos-latest.raw of=${empty_disk_device} bs=4M where ${empty_disk_device} is the device representing the attached volume

  10. Detach the volume, from the VM

  11. Go to PowerVC UI->images and select create for creating a new image

  12. Specify image name and choose PowerVM for Hypervisor type, RHEL for Operating system and littleEndian for Endianness

  13. Select Add Volume and search for the specific volume name (where you dd-ed the RHCOS image ) and set Boot set to yes.

  14. Create the image by clicking on create

Option-2

Creating and importing RHCOS OVA image

  1. Download the RHCOS image from the following link on a system with public internet access. You'll need a way to transfer this image to a RHEL VM that you'll create in the next step.
  2. Login to PowerVC and create a RHEL 8.x VM
  3. Use the script https://github.com/ocp-power-automation/infra/blob/master/scripts/images/convert_qcow2_ova.py and convert the RHCOS qcow2 image to an OVA formatted image.
  4. Follow the steps mentioned in PowerVC docs to import the OVA image.