I'm building a RHEL6 VM with VMWare Studio at present. One of my requirements is to have the OVA pre-patched with all the latest available OS updates from Red Hat. I managed to get this working by adding an application pre-install step that temporarily adds a yum repo file that points to a local server with all the latest updates pre-downloaded, running 'yum upgrade -y' and then removing the repo file again.
This all seemed to work fine, except that the updates included a kernel update, which resulted in the VMWare Tools daemon process failing to start when the machine was deployed. vmware-config-tools.pl needed to be run (from the system console) to get around this.
I tried adding 'vmware-config-tools.pl -d' to my application pre-install step after the OS patching completed. However, this only operates against the currently loaded kernel, rather than the one that has just been downloaded and applied. That is, I would need the system to reboot after being patched, before running this will have the desired effect.
Hence my question - is there a way that I can configure my build profile such that the Red Hat installation process will take any update packages from my updates repository in preference to what is included on the ISO installation media? This would ensure the latest kernel is loaded when the system reboots after the OS install step and thereby obviate the need for me to run vmware-config-tools.pl at all (since VMWare Tools only gets installed after that point anyway).
For the time being, I've applied a workaround whereby the 'vmware-config-tools.pl -d' command is executed on first boot, but this is clunky in my opinion and adds significantly to the first boot start time of the VM.
I've considered building a custom RHEL ISO using all the available updates. I'm not sure what checksums I might need to update in the ISO image though, or what other problems this may introduce.
Any thoughts appreciated!
Thanks,
John