• Launchpad Entry: karmic-qa-virtual-testing-environments

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• Packages affected:

Summary

Provide regularly updated KVM instances that can be downloaded with various versions of Ubuntu for testing and debugging use.

Rationale

We want to lower the barrier to entry for people wishing to test various aspects of Ubuntu; setting up a virtualization environment can be intimidating for a new participant.

User stories

• Fred wants to reproduce an issue that he's having with openoffice in Jaunty with openoffice in Karmic to see if the issue still exists in that release.
• Sally notes that a call for testing Empathy in Karmic has gone out and wishes to participate; however, she does not wish to upgrade her workstation to the development release yet.
• Ruth would like to help test an alpha release, but does not want to go through the trouble of installing from an ISO image.

Assumptions

The main thrust of using virtual environments in testing is application testing rather than kernel testing. Kernel testing and in particular hardware support testing often requires specific hardware that virtualization technologies often do not provide (though it can help with cross-architecture testing, e.g. ARM).

Implementation

Building images

• Allocate a machine in the datacenter for image building
  • should be vt capable - it's much slower if done through emulation
• Build kvm images automatically on a regular basis (weekly)

Initial targets

• Hardy i386/server
• Karmic i386/server

Publication

• Publish on qa.ubuntu.com
  • need rsync facility
  • not mirrored

  • images can be compressed (qcow2 format); this should be rsync-friendly but should be verified

Future work

Longer term we can also look to pushing images to EC2 or another cloud

• see also server-karmic-ec2-automation which also covers automatically generating and publishing ec2 images.

Action Items

• coordinate KVM image creation (Steave Beattie)
  • work with IS team and community to create and host images
    • ideally images need to be created in the data center rather than uploading them there

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