post-installation tasks after creating a virtual machine from an image

[Guerin, Paul James]

Hi ,
In reference to the following document on virtualization:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/virtualization.html

The problem is that there is no information regarding the post-installation tasks after creating a virtual machine using an image file.

For example, I have downloaded the following image file for virtualbox: FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64.vhd

That file is a virtual machine image to download and import on a virtual environment of choice. There are images for KVM (“qcow2”), VMWare (“vmdk”), Hyper-V (“vhd”), and raw device images that are universally supported. These are not installation images, but rather the preconfigured (“already installed”) instances, ready to run and perform post-installation tasks.

After I create the virtual machine with the vhd image file, the root is already installed. However this file has no free space, so the root mount-point is already 100% utilized.
As the root is 100% utilized, I'm unable to download any packages or do anything else to the root.
However I can manually create other vhd files, and partitions, and mount them to the virtual machine.

I have tried to extend the root using the current documentation. The documentation does have an example, where the swap partition is dropped to free space, then the root is extended. I tried to do the same in virtualbox, but I think the problem is that the space freed by the drop of the swap file is before the root mount point, not after. So the instructions in the documentation did not solve the problem.

There just needs to be some post-installation tasks defined in the documentation, so that the virtual machine is usable after creating a virtual machine using an image.

cheers,
Paul


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