A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away when I started with openvz I followed this tutorial for Debian template creation. Now I am adapting it (using my own experience and this template-squeeze tutorial too) to Qemu/KVM disk images than later can be used directly or via libvirt.
This procedure tries to generalize the template. While working with disk cloned images many elements need to be “generalized” before capturing and deploying a disk image to multiple computers. Some of these elements include:
- ssh keys
- /etc/apt/sources.list
The more “generalized” is a template, the less manual work is needed after deploying it.
This method must work in others virtualization systems: vmware, virtualbox, etc. As it is “virtualizator/hypervisor/emulator independent” as it is focused only in the disk image.