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iso2class Reference - ISOs used for OS installations in CA 3Tera AppLogic

Creating new appliances in CA 3Tera AppLogic for specific Operating systems requires the use of ISO images (cd-rom/DVD). The ISO is used to install the OS inside of an CA 3Tera AppLogic appliance using the iso2class CA 3Tera AppLogic utility. The ISO may be stored on the grid's impex volume, or a global volume or it may come from a remote website (using HTTP).

CA has tested various ISOs downloaded from the web: Microsoft's website (trial versions of Windows 2003 Server), Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS 5. In addition, CA has tested Microsoft's SPLA Windows CD-ROMs (32-bit R2 Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter/Web editions). To use the SPLA Windows CD-ROMs to create Windows appliances, the ISO images must be created from the CD-ROMs so that they can be used with iso2class. The procedure below explains how to create an ISO from a CD-ROM for any OS distribution that you may want to use for your CA 3Tera AppLogic appliances:

To create an ISO from a CD-ROM

  1. Attach a CD-ROM drive to one of your Linux-based servers (if needed) and insert the CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive.
  2. Use the mount command to verify if the CD-ROM is mounted. If the CD-ROM is mounted, unmount it: umount /mnt/cdrom
  3. Run the following command: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=my-image.iso

    This command makes a block-level copy of the CD-ROM into the specified ISO image file. The resulting ISO image file is an exact copy of the CD-ROM. my-image.iso is now the ISO image you can use with iso2class to create your own Windows appliances. Typically this image is copied onto the grid's impex volume and imported as a global volume (vol import _GLOBAL:win03iso my-image.iso). When using the iso2class utility, _GLOBAL:win03iso would be the ISO image to use for the OS installation.

Important! CA has only tested OS installations using the ISOs mentioned above. If the ISO images are generated in any other way (that is, a 3rd party ISO ripping tool/application), the resulting ISOs may not work with CA 3Tera AppLogic.