vmlab

A simple way to manage and control virtual machines.

Future of the project

This script works well on a laptop or a single server but in order to support multiple compute nodes and shared storage, I'm renaming this project to vmlab2, implementing it in Ruby, and re-writing the hypervisor wrappers in Posix shell for better compatibility with qemu/kvm, bhyve, and vmm.

Development will continue at github.com/mattrush/vmlab2. I'll also continue to develop this script.

Features

• Uses the virtualization capabilities present in the kernel
• Works fine on just a single laptop
• Works fine on multiple nodes with shared storage
• Simple design tries to conform to Unix philosophy
• Builds on proven, standard tools
  • posix shell
  • ssh key-based auth
  • rsync over ssh
  • vnc over tls, with x509 auth
  • qemu
  • git repo containing json text files

Dependencies

• Intel or AMD cpu supporting vt-x
• Kernel supporting kvm
• Bash (to be replaced with ash 0.4.0)
• Openssh
• Openssl
• Rsync
• Git
• Qemu
• Jshon
• Jansson
• Socat (to be replaced with nc)

Note: If you want to run this on AMD processors, make sure to find and replace the kvm-intel module name. This is probably trivial but I haven't tested it yet.

Design

• Nodes sync metadata via rsync over ssh
• Metadata is JSON, in text files, in a git repository
• A central console uses ssh to control the nodes
• It's just shell. No messing with $trendyLang or $crustyLang
• Security features are worth the slight increase in complexity (SPKI and x509)

Installation

• Download the source
  • git clone https://github.com/mattrush/vmlab/vmlab.git
• Generate a package for your platform
  • mkSlackpkg.sh for Slackware
• Install the package
  • slackpkg install vmlab-_nomasters.txz for Slackware
  • dpkg --install vmlab-_nomasters.deb for Debian and Ubuntu
• Create a user
  • grep -e "^vmlab:" /etc/passwd >/dev/null || umask=600 adduser -g nobody -h /dev/null -s /bin/false vmlab
• Mount shared storage (or just populate /vlab-iso with your iso collection, if you don't need multiple hypervising hosts)
  • Add nfs (or whatever you want) mounts to /etc/fstab and mount them
    • echo -e "/vmlab-iso nfs@$nfsHost ro 0 0\n/vmlab-tmpl nfs@$nfsHost ro 0 0\n/vmlab-data nfs@$nfsHost defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
    • mount -a
• Create a guest
  • vmlab DarkStarVm conf -m 512M -s 20G -o slackware64-14.2
  • vmlab DarkStarVm create
  • vmlab DarkStarVm boot
• Confirm the guest is running
  • vmlab status
    • make a note of the port number output by 'vmlab status'
• Access the guest
  • vncviewer <hypervisor_ip_address>:<guest_port_number>
• Profit

Todo

• Adapt to support FreeBSD's kvm
• Replace all Bash with Posix shell (ash 0.4.0) for speed and portability
  • This is possible since Jshon removes the need for Bash regex support
• Replace configuration file format with JSON
  • Node metadata updates will be fast
    • Rsync fragments of JSON text files over ssh
• Add configuration support for AMD
• Add a minimalist ruby web interface
  • Ruby supports JSON
  • Dancer, Sinatra, and similar minimalist frameworks
• Add package build scripts for other platforms
  • mkDeb.sh for Debian, Kali, Ubuntu, etc.
  • mkFbsd.sh for FreeBSD
  • mkPkg.sh for Arch Linux
  • mkRpm.sh for CentOS, RHEL, SUSE, etc.
  • mkFlat.sh for Fedora