Today we’re releasing our On-Prem Meta OVA release v12.
This release contains a few bug fixes, and a ton of awesome new features.
Update Oct. 1, 2018: We shipped a new minor update with a ton of performance optimizations.
A feature added to our TODO list back in 2016, it is now possible to manage the TinyCore .tcz extensions directly through the Meta UI or API. Not only can you view all the existing extensions on disk, but it’s also possible to upload new .tcz extensions and start building with them. It is not yet possible to “automatically” download extensions from the official TinyCore repos, but that will be added eventually.
VirtualBox and VMware provide the ability to validate an imported OVA’s “signature”. This feature is not well known, but it’s similar to signed Android or iOS apps. Essentially, it allows the person importing the OVA to confirm who built the OVA, and to ensure it wasn’t tampered with in transit. When uploading RSA certificates to the Meta OVA, they will automatically be used to sign all future OVAs.
While working on this feature, we discovered an issue with the way our .vmdk disks were created, so we fixed that as well, which led to the following two additional features:
With our new approach to creating .vmdk disks, it is now possible to create them on-the-fly for every build. This provides our customers with more flexibility for their OVA configurations, since the disks don’t need to be created in advance, by us, anymore. We allow arbitrary sizes in 1GiB increments and the value is specified in the Ansible builder config file.
Since we were knee-deep in the OVA disk world, we decided to also provide the ability to export the OVA’s OS disk to .qcow2, .raw, and .vhd formats.
This is a build-time option and results in a disk1..tar.gz which can be downloaded and easily deployed to various hypervisors and/or cloud providers (such as Xen, AWS, GCP, Azure).. and that leads to the last new feature of this Meta release:
We opted not to implement an automated AWS -> AMI export feature for various reasons. Instead, “Cloud documentation” is accessible through from support section, with instructions on how to deploy the RAW OVA disk image to Amazon’s EC2 service.
We plan on adding instructions for other cloud providers in our next release.
Of course, this means our On-Prem Meta appliance is also officially available on Amazon Web Services.
We weren’t satisfied with the v1.12.0 release, so we worked hard to ship v1.12.1 as quickly as possible, with a ton of performance improvements.
To list some of the changes we’ve made:
gzip with pigz for multi-core parallel compressionWith these changes, our own Meta appliance builds are now 2x faster (down from 4 to 2 minutes).
We’ve moved away from updating a wiki with our release information, and built dedicated Release pages and an RSS feed to centralize everything. We’ll be rolling that out to all our customers shortly.
As usual, feel free to contact us and tell us your story.