Hello Forum Members,

Hopefully someone here can help me out with this tough problem, or at least point me in the right direction.

I am using the Microsoft Azure Platform with their custom OpenLogic CentOS distro. (Please no flames, MS make terrible operating systems, but their cloud platform is actually quite good!) However I would like to run vanilla CentOS 7 rather than the MS distro. I am having trouble devising a way to load this OS onto a VM.

For those not familiar with the service, the standard method is to connect to a VM using SSH or RSH or similar if you were to set them up. The nodes have no graphics cards, so all interaction is done through shell.

My first (and simplest) option was to do a standard pre-upgrade/upgrade. Pre-upgrade recognised that the OS was running under HyperV, and unfortunately gave the feedback that this would be EXTREMELY risky. I am tempted to give it a go on a cloned VM to see what happens, but I am sure there is a legitimate reason that it should not be done, and I would prefer not to risk the stability of the system in the future.

My second option was to download the live image, mount it, extract the squashfs.img from the LiveOS and insert an init script to install and start and run sshd as well as added an extra user to passwd/shadow/group so that I could login with a predetermined password. This method was unsuccessful as the boot disk I created with the liveOS did not boot.

My third option is to run a VM inside the Azure VM (VM inception!) that is attached to another disk, and then boot the VM with the LiveOS iso. After it is booted, I should be able to install onto the mounted HDD as standard. Problem with this method is that I will have to VNC forward the guest of the guest VM to my local machine, as there is no way (that I know) for the host to interact with the guest.

Surely people have come across this issue before, where an OS must be installed on a headless node. I hope someone out there could please shed some light on this (I will be very grateful).

Thank you,

Stuart

Hope this helps
http://blogs.technet.com/b/dcaro/arc...oft-azure.aspx