VMWare | Create Template CentOS 6.5

In this article, I am going to outline a very basic and quick way to create a VMWare virtual machine template for provisioning CentOS (or RHEL) 6.5 in your VMWare environment. As I mentioned, this is a very basic configuration and does not take into consideration large scale deployments and is really intended as a starting point for a template for large scale production. 1. Perform the installation of CentOS Minimal as you would any Virtual Machine. Set the roo 2. Install perl by issuing the following command: yum install perl 3. Install vmware tools. Accept all defaults during the VMWare tools installation: mkdir /mnt/cdrom mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom cp VMWare-tools-XXXX.tar.gz ~root cd ~root tar zxf VMWare-tool-XXX.tar.gz cd vmware-tools ./vmwaretools-install.pl cd .. rm –rf vmware-tools VMWare-tools-XXX.tar.gz 4. After the base install, update the OS by issuing the following commands: yum update reboot 5. Clean the yum cache by issuing the command: yum clean all 6. To prevent hardware issues, remove udev persistent rules by issuing the following command: rm –f /etc/udev/rules.d/70* 7. To prevent networking issues, remove the MAC and UUID of the NIC. New ones will be obtained upon clone: sed –i ‘/*\(HWADDR\|UUID\)=/d’ /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 8. Clearing out the logs on the server is also a good idea. This can be accomplished as follows: NOTE: Where ‘?’ is usually the date but will depend on your logroatate.conf configuration. logrotate –f /etc/logrotate.conf rm-rf /var/log/*-???????? /var/log/*.gz cat /dev/null > /var/log/audit/audit.log cat /dev/null > /var/log/wtmp 9. Clear out all Temp directories as follows: rm –rf /tmp/* rm –rf /var/tmp/* 10. Now we will remove any SSH host keys for security: rm-rf /etc/ssh/*keys* 11. For good measure, lets create an administrative user in case we need access later, after the root password has been changed by the user: adduser admin passwd admin 12. We want the root password changed upon booting up the server, so: chage –d 0 root 13. We also do not want the new user to have a copy of what we have just done in the bash history, so lets wipe that out as well: rm –f ~root/.bash_history