Installing Operating System Packages for a Virtual Appliance
InstallAnywhere 2021
The prebuilt VM templates that are available for InstallAnywhere include several operating system packages, such as SSH, wget, perl, and openssl. These packages are used by the virtual appliance creation process.
However, there might be a need to install additional operating system packages for your specific virtual appliance to work. You can simply choose the ones for your virtual appliance in the Build Appliances view on the Build page, and these will be installed for you during the creation of the virtual appliance.
To customize the OS packages that are installed with your virtual appliance:
| 1. | In the Advanced Designer, on the Build page, click Build Appliances. The Build Appliances view opens. |
| 2. | Click the Appliance Configuration tab. |
| 3. | In the Select Appliance Configuration list, select the appliance configuration that you want to customize. |
| 4. | Click the VM Configuration tab. |
| 5. | For VMware vSphere appliances: In the Select VM Tier list, select the VM tier that you want to configure. |
| 6. | Click the OS Packages subtab. All of the OS packages that are available to install are listed in the Packages Available to Install list. |
| 7. | In the Packages Available to Install list, select the package that you want to add and click the Add button. |
InstallAnywhere adds the OS package to the Packages Selected to Install list.
For more information, see OS Packages Subtab.
Note:For information on defining your own custom repositories for the installation of operating system packages, see Specifying Which OS Package Repository to Use for Virtual Appliances.
About Using Ubuntu OS Packages
On Ubuntu, while OS packages are being installed, the Package Manager of Ubuntu tries to fix any pre-existing problems with the packages that are installed on the machine. Therefore, problems may occur when a package installation has failed before the appliance build runs.
For example, if prior to the appliance build and deployment, the end user installed a package named Package_A, and within the appliance the appliance author has bundled another package named Package_X, the installation of OS packages on Ubuntu causes the Ubuntu Package Manager to retry the installation of Package_A before it tries to install Package_X. If Package_A continues to have problems with installation, these errors cause the installation of Package_X to fail, causing the entire appliance build and deployment to fail.
In order to avoid such errors, you are advised to run the following command and ensure that all errors are resolved:
dpkg-reconfigure -a
If you create OS packages that are proprietary and not part of the standard Ubuntu or CentOS ecosystem, you can include them in your virtual appliance. For more information, see Using RPM/Debian Packages for Proprietary Operating Systems on Virtual Appliances.