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Prepare a Red Hat-based virtual machine for Azure

  • Article

Applies to: ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets ✔️ Uniform scale sets

In this article, you learn how to prepare a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) virtual machine (VM) for use in Azure. The versions of RHEL that are covered in this article are 7.x, 8.X., 9.x. The hypervisors for preparation that are covered in this article are Hyper-V, kernel-based VM (KVM), VMware and Kickstart.

For more information about eligibility requirements for participating in Red Hat's Cloud Access program, see the Red Hat Cloud Access website and Running RHEL on Azure. For ways to automate building RHEL images, see Azure Image Builder.

Note

Be aware of versions that are at their end of life (EOL) and are no longer supported by Red Hat. Uploaded images that are at or beyond EOL are supported on a reasonable business-effort basis. For more information, see the Red Hat Product Life Cycles.

Prerequisites

This section assumes that you've already obtained an ISO file from the Red Hat website and installed the RHEL image to a virtual hard disk (VHD). For more information about how to use Hyper-V Manager to install an operating system image, see Install the Hyper-V role and configure a virtual machine.

RHEL installation notes

  • Azure doesn't support the VHDX format. Azure supports only fixed VHD. You can use Hyper-V Manager to convert the disk to VHD format, or you can use the convert-vhd cmdlet. If you use VirtualBox, select Fixed size as opposed to the default dynamically allocated option when you create the disk.
  • Azure supports Gen1 (BIOS boot) and Gen2 (UEFI boot) VMs.
  • The maximum size that's allowed for the VHD is 1,023 GB.
  • The vfat kernel module must be enabled in the kernel.
  • Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is supported and can be used on the OS disk or data disks in Azure VMs. In general, we recommend that you use standard partitions on the OS disk rather than LVM. This practice avoids LVM name conflicts with cloned VMs, particularly if you ever need to attach an operating system disk to another identical VM for troubleshooting. For more information, see the LVM and RAID documentation.
  • Kernel support for mounting Universal Disk Format (UDF) file systems is required. At first boot on Azure, the UDF-formatted media that's attached to the guest passes the provisioning configuration to the Linux VM. The Azure Linux agent must be able to mount the UDF file system to read its configuration and provision the VM. Without this step, provisioning fails.
  • Don't configure a swap partition on the operating system disk. For more information, read the following steps.
  • All VHDs on Azure must have a virtual size aligned to 1 MB. When you convert from a raw disk to VHD, you must ensure that the raw disk size is a multiple of 1 MB before conversion. For more information, read the following steps. See also Linux installation notes.

Note

Cloud-init >= 21.2 removes the UDF requirement. However, without the UDF module enabled, the CD-ROM won't mount during provisioning, which prevents custom data from being applied. A workaround is to apply custom data by using user data. Unlike custom data, user data isn't encrypted. For more information, see User data formats.

  1. In Hyper-V Manager, select the VM.

  2. Select Connect to open a console window for the VM.

  3. Create or edit the /etc/sysconfig/network file, and add the following text:

    config 
    NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=localhost.localdomain

  4. Create or edit the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file, and add the following text:

    config 
    DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
TYPE=Ethernet
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=yes
IPV6INIT=no
PERSISTENT_DHCLIENT=yes
NM_CONTROLLED=yes

    Note

    When you use Accelerated Networking, the synthetic interface that's created must be configured to be unmanaged by using a udev rule. This action prevents NetworkManager from assigning the same IP to it as the primary interface.

    To apply it:

    Bash 
    sudo tee <<EOF /etc/udev/rules.d/68-azure-sriov-nm-unmanaged.rules > /dev/null
# Accelerated Networking on Azure exposes a new SRIOV interface to the VM.
# This interface is transparently bonded to the synthetic interface,
# so NetworkManager should just ignore any SRIOV interfaces.
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="hv_pci", ACTION!="remove", ENV{NM_UNMANAGED}="1"
EOF

  5. Ensure that the network service starts at boot time:

    Bash 
    sudo systemctl enable network

  6. Register your Red Hat subscription to enable the installation of packages from the RHEL repository:

    Bash 
    sudo subscription-manager register --auto-attach --username=XXX --password=XXX

  7. Modify the kernel boot line in your grub configuration to include more kernel parameters for Azure. To do this modification, open /etc/default/grub in a text editor and edit the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX parameter. For example:

    config-grub 
    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="console=tty1 console=ttyS0,115200n8 earlyprintk=ttyS0 net.ifnames=0"
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="serial console"
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --speed=115200 --unit=0 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"
ENABLE_BLSCFG=true

    Note

    If ENABLE_BLSCFG=false is present in /etc/default/grub instead of ENABLE_BLSCFG=true, tools such as grubedit or gubby, which rely on the Boot Loader Specification (BLS) for managing boot entries and configurations, might not function correctly in RHEL 8 and 9. If ENABLE_BLSCFG isn't present, the default behavior is false.

    This modification also ensures that all console messages are sent to the first serial port and enables interaction with the serial console, which can assist Azure support with debugging issues. This configuration also turns off the new naming conventions for network interface cards (NICs).

    config 
    rhgb quiet crashkernel=auto

    Graphical and quiet boots aren't useful in a cloud environment where you want all the logs to be sent to the serial port. You can leave the crashkernel option configured if you want. This parameter reduces the amount of available memory in the VM by 128 MB or more, which might be a problem for smaller VM sizes.

  8. After you're finished editing /etc/default/grub, run the following command to rebuild the grub configuration:

    Bash 
    sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

    Note

    If you're uploading a UEFI-enabled VM, the command to update grub is grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/redhat/grub.cfg.

  9. Ensure that the SSH server is installed and configured to start at boot time, which is usually the default. Modify /etc/ssh/sshd_config to include the following line:

    config 
    ClientAliveInterval 180

  10. The WALinuxAgent package, WALinuxAgent-<version>, has been pushed to the Red Hat extras repository. Enable the extras repository:

    Bash 
    sudo subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-extras-rpms

  11. Install the Azure Linux agent, cloud-init, and other necessary utilities:

    Bash 
    sudo yum install -y WALinuxAgent cloud-init cloud-utils-growpart gdisk hyperv-daemons
sudo systemctl enable waagent.service
sudo systemctl enable cloud-init.service

  12. Configure cloud-init to handle the provisioning:

    1. Configure waagent for cloud-init:

      Bash 
      sudo sed -i 's/Provisioning.Agent=auto/Provisioning.Agent=auto/g' /etc/waagent.conf
sudo sed -i 's/ResourceDisk.Format=y/ResourceDisk.Format=n/g' /etc/waagent.conf
sudo sed -i 's/ResourceDisk.EnableSwap=y/ResourceDisk.EnableSwap=n/g' /etc/waagent.conf

      Note

      If you're migrating a specific VM and don't want to create a generalized image, set Provisioning.Agent=disabled on the /etc/waagent.conf configuration.

    2. Configure mounts:

      Bash 
      sudo echo "Adding mounts and disk_setup to init stage"
sudo sed -i '/ - mounts/d' /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg
sudo sed -i '/ - disk_setup/d' /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg
sudo sed -i '/cloud_init_modules/a\\ - mounts' /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg
sudo sed -i '/cloud_init_modules/a\\ - disk_setup' /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg

    3. Configure the Azure data source:

      Bash 
      sudo echo "Allow only Azure datasource, disable fetching network setting via IMDS"
sudo tee /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/91-azure_datasource.cfg <<EOF
datasource_list: [ Azure ]
datasource:
    Azure:
        apply_network_config: False
EOF

    4. If configured, remove the existing swap file:

      Bash 
      if [[ -f /mnt/resource/swapfile ]]; then
echo "Removing swapfile" #RHEL uses a swapfile by default
swapoff /mnt/resource/swapfile
rm /mnt/resource/swapfile -f
fi

    5. Configure cloud-init logging:

      Bash 
      sudo echo "Add console log file"
sudo tee <<EOF /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/05_logging.cfg > /dev/null

# This tells cloud-init to redirect its stdout and stderr to
# 'tee -a /var/log/cloud-init-output.log' so the user can see output
# there without needing to look on the console.
output: {all: '| tee -a /var/log/cloud-init-output.log'}
EOF

  13. Swap configuration:

    • Don't create swap space on the operating system disk.

      Previously, the Azure Linux agent was used to automatically configure swap space by using the local resource disk that's attached to the VM after the VM is provisioned on Azure. This action is now handled by cloud-init. You must not use the Linux agent to format the resource disk to create the swap file. Modify the following parameters in /etc/waagent.conf appropriately:

      config 
      ResourceDisk.Format=n
ResourceDisk.EnableSwap=n

    • If you want to mount, format, and create the swap, you can either:

      • Pass this code in as a cloud-init configuration every time you create a VM through custom data. We recommend this method.

      • Use a cloud-init directive baked into the image that does this step every time the VM is created.

        Bash 
        sudo echo 'DefaultEnvironment="CLOUD_CFG=/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/00-azure-swap.cfg"' >> /etc/systemd/system.conf
sudo tee /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/00-azure-swap.cfg << EOF    
#cloud-config
# Generated by Azure cloud image build
disk_setup:
  ephemeral0:
    table_type: mbr
    layout: [66, [33, 82]]
    overwrite: True
fs_setup:
  - device: ephemeral0.1
    filesystem: ext4
  - device: ephemeral0.2
    filesystem: swap
mounts:
  - ["ephemeral0.1", "/mnt/resource"]
  - ["ephemeral0.2", "none", "swap", "sw,nofail,x-systemd.requires=cloud-init.service,x-systemd.device-timeout=2", "0", "0"]
EOF

  14. Configure cloud-init telemetry to assist with troubleshooting for provisioning issues:

    Bash 
    sudo tee >> /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/10-azure-kvp.cfg << EOF
# This config enables cloud-init to report provisioning telemetry to aid with troubleshooting
Reporting:
  logging:
    type: log
  telemetry:
    type: hyperv
EOF

  15. If you want to unregister the subscription, run the following command:

    Bash 
    
sudo subscription-manager unregister

  16. Deprovision the VM and prepare it for provisioning on Azure:

    Caution

    If you're migrating a specific VM and don't want to create a generalized image, skip the deprovision step. Running the command waagent -force -deprovision+user renders the source machine unusable. This step is intended only to create a generalized image.

    Bash 
    sudo rm -f /var/log/waagent.log
sudo cloud-init clean --logs --seed
sudo waagent -force -deprovision+user
sudo rm -f ~/.bash_history
sudo export HISTSIZE=0

  17. Select Action > Shut Down in Hyper-V Manager. Your Linux VHD is now ready to be uploaded to Azure.