.\"                                      Hey, EMACS: -*- nroff -*-
.TH fai-diskimage 8 "September 2018" "FAI 5.7"

.SH NAME
fai-diskimage \- create a disk image for booting a VM
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B fai-diskimage \fIimagename\fR
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B fai-diskimage
creates a disk image that can be used with Qemu/KVM, VirtualBox,
VMware, Xen, Android device or by your cloud infrastructure. It runs the Fully
Automatic Installation using a list of FAI classes. In the end you
have a bootable disk image. Following formats are
supported: .raw.xz, .raw.zst, .qcow2, .vdi, .vhdx, .vmdk, .simg.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B \-c, --class \fICLASS\fR[,\fICLASS\fR]
Define list of FAI classes
.TP
.B -h, --help
Print help
.TP
.B -N, --new
This option will be passed to the fai call. It then executes the
scripts in class/[0-9]* for defining classes.
.TP
.B -S, --size \fISIZE\fR
Set size of raw image (suffixes k M G T are supported)
.TP
.B -s, \--cspace \fIURI\fR
Location of the config space. If location starts with /, the prefix
file:// will be added. See fai.conf(5) for all supported
protocols. Default is /srv/fai/config.
.TP
.B -u, --hostname \fIname\fR
Set hostname to name
.TP
.B -v, --verbose
Be verbose

.SH EXAMPLES

First, setup the configuration space. You will get an initial
configuration including several examples.

 # fai-mk-configspace

You can now build your fist disk image.

 # export FAI_BASEFILEURL=https://fai-project.org/download/basefiles/
 # cl="DEBIAN,STRETCH64,AMD64,FAIBASE,GRUB_PC,DHCPC,DEMO,CLOUD,LAST"
 # fai-diskimage -vu cloud3 -S2G -c$cl cloud.raw

Creates a Debian system with a small set of software packages without
graphical desktop. The disk image cloud.raw will be of size 2 GB and
the host is called cloud3.


 # export FAI_BASEFILEURL=https://fai-project.org/download/basefiles/
 # cl=DHCPC,UBUNTU,XENIAL,XENIAL64,AMD64,XORG,LAST
 # fai-diskimage -vNu ubuntu -S7G -c$cl ubuntu.qcow2

Creates a disk image of size 7GB called ubuntu.qcow2 for a Ubuntu 16.04 desktop.

.SH NOTES
fai-diskimage will use zerofree if it's available on the host for
getting better compression of the raw images.

Before creating an image, make sure you have the configuration space
available. Create the config space for FAI by using the examples from
the fai-doc package.

 # fai-mk-configspace

fai-diskimage is not limited to creating images for virtual
machines. The raw images can also be copied (via dd) onto a real disk
for booting bare metal hosts.

You can start fai-diskimage in a clean shell environment by calling:

 # env -i /usr/sbin/fai-diskimage -vNu cloudhost -S5G -cSTRETCH64,GCE disk.raw


You can also build cross-architecture disk images using
fai-disimage. See the chapter "Building cross-architecture disk
images" in the FAI guide for details.

.SH SEE ALSO
.br
This program is part of FAI (Fully Automatic Installation).  See the FAI manual
for more information on how to use fai-monitor.  The FAI homepage is https://fai-project.org.
.SH AUTHOR
Thomas Lange <lange@informatik.uni-koeln.de>