Virtual Machine Tools

The programs distributed within this repository enable users to quickly configure and use virtual machines as development and test environment on a Linux workstation. Programs in the bin/ sub-directory build a tool-chain to bootstrap multiple virtual machine instances in a very customizable way.

The tool-chain is based on software available in all modern Linux distributions:

• Linux KVM is used as virtualization platform.
• Libvirt interfaces with KVM and manages the virtual machine network.
• SSH, Rsync, and SSHfs allows access the virtual machine instances.

Make sure to Install and configure Libvirt

Comprehensive examples:

• OpenHPC Slurm Cluster with SaltStack
• Apache Mesos Cluster with SaltStack
• Lustre Parallel Filesystem with SaltStack

The shell script ↴ source_me.sh adds the tool-chain in this repository to your shell environment:

>>> source source_me.sh

It will add the bin/ sub-directory to your PATH and define several additional environment variables cf. var/aliases/env.sh.

Usage

The docs/ sub-directory includes all documentation required to use this tool-chain:

• docs/network.md explains the setup of the virtual machine network
• docs/image.md describes how to create re-usable virtual machine images (aka templates)
• docs/instance.md shows how to use VM images to create any number of virtual machine instances, and how to configure the resources available to VM instance.
• docs/workflow.md explains in great detail how to efficiently interact with virtual machine instances. How to login, execute commands within a VM, copy file between host and the VM, and how to mount the VM root file-system.
• docs/nodeset.md exemplifies operation of multiple virtual machine instance

Configure a virtual machine instance with a Configuration Management System:

• docs/ansible.md show how to configure virtual machine instance with Ansible.
• docs/chef.md describes how to us the chef-instance command to execute Chef Solo in a virtual machine instance.
• docs/salt.md describes how to create a configuration to use Salt SSH with salt-instance

License

Copyright 2012-2019 Victor Penso

This is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.