You want to spawn local VM quickly.. Like... really quickly. You want them to be as generical as possible. Actually you would like to reuse some existing cloud images!
This is the right tool for you.
Virt-Lightning exposes a CLI inspired by the Cloud and Vagrant. It can also prepare the Ansible inventory file.
This is handy to quickly validate a new Ansible playbook, or a role on a large number of environments.
In a nutshell:
echo "- distro: centos-7" > virt-lightning.yaml
vl up
vl ansible_inventory > inventory
ansible all -m ping -i inventory
During this recording, we:
python3-libvirt
.python3-urwid
if you want to get the fancy list of VM. This dependency is optional.sudo systemctl start --now libvirtd
virsh -c qemu:///system
pip3 install --user virt-lightning
If you use Ubuntu, you will need the --no-deps
argument (See: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/4222).
virt-lightning
will be installed in ~/.local/bin/. Add it in your $PATH
if
it's not already the case. For instance if you use:
echo "export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin/" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
Before you start your first VM, you need to fetch the images. To do so,
you just use the vm fetch
command:
$ vl fetch fedora-32
vl
is an alias for virt-lightning
, you can us both. In the rest of the document
we use the shortest version.
List the distro images that can be used. Its output is compatible with vl up
. You can initialize a new configuration with: vl distro_list > virt-lightning.yaml
.
virt-lightning
will read the virt-lightning.yaml
file from the current directory and prepare the associated VM.
Destroy all the VM managed by Virt-Lightning.
Start a specific VM, without reading the virt-lightning.yaml
file.
Stop just one VM.
List the VM, their IP and if they are reachable.
Export an inventory in the Ansible format.
Show up a menu to select a host and open a ssh connection.
Like vl ssh
but with the serial console of the VM.
Like vl console
but with the SPICE console of the VM. Requires virt-viewer
.
Fetch a VM image. You can find here a list of the available images. You can also update the custom configuration to add a private image hub.
If ~/.config/virt-lightning/config.ini
exists, Virt-Lightning will read
its configuration there.
[main]
network_name = virt-lightning
root_password = root
storage_pool = virt-lightning
network_auto_clean_up = True
network_name: if you want to use an alternative libvirt network
root_password: the root password
storage_pool: if you want to use an alternative libvirt storage pool
networkautoclean_up: if you want to automatically remove a network when running virt-lightning down
private_hub: if you need to set additional url from where images should be retrieved, update the configuration file ~/.config/virt-lightning/config.ini
adding the following
[main]
private_hub=url1,url2
A VM can be tuned at two different places with the following keys:
distro
: the name of the base distro image to use, it's the only mandatory parameter.name
: the VM namememory
: the amount of memory to dedicate to the VMroot_disk_size
: the size of the root disk in GBvcpus
: the number of vcpu to dedicate to the VMroot_password
: the root password in clear textgroups
: this list of groups will be used if you generate an Ansible inventory.networks
: a list of network to attach to the VM. The default is: one virtio interface attached to virt-lightning
network.
network
: the name of the network. Default is the key network_name
from the configuration (virt-lightning
by default)ipv4
: a static IPv4. Default is a dynamic IPv4 address.nic_model
: the libvirt driver to use. Default is virtio
virt-lightning.yaml
file:- name: esxi-vcenter
distro: esxi-6.7
memory: 12000
root_disk_size: 30
vcpus: 2
root_password: '!234AaAa56'
groups: ['all_esxi']
- name: esxi1
distro: esxi-6.7
memory: 4096
vcpus: 1
root_password: '!234AaAa56'
groups: ['all_esxi', 'esxi_lab']
- name: esxi2
distro: esxi-6.7
memory: 4096
vcpus: 1
root_password: '!234AaAa56'
groups: ['all_esxi', 'esxi_lab']
- name: centos-7
distro: centos-7
networks:
- network: default
ipv4: 192.168.122.50
bootcmd:
- yum update -y
cat /var/lib/virt-lightning/pool/upstream/esxi-6.7.yaml
username: root
python_interpreter: /bin/python
memory: 4096
networks:
- network: virt-lightning
nic_model: virtio
- network: default
nic_model: e1000