Automate KVM on Arch Linux

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Introduction

This is a tutorial on how to automate the setup of VMs using KVM on Arch Linux. This tutorial uses QEMU as a back-end for KVM and libvirt, Packer and Vagrant.

This tutorial is meant as a supplement to my OVH: Custom Installation tutorial

Installation

Before getting started there are a few packages that will be needed to set all of this up.

# pacaur -S libvirt openssl-1.0 packer-io qemu-headless qemu-headless-arch-extra vagrant

vagrant-libvirt

The libvirt plugin installation for vagrant requires some cleanup first.

# sudo mv /opt/vagrant/embedded/lib/libcurl.so{,.backup} # sudo mv /opt/vagrant/embedded/lib/libcurl.so.4{,.backup} # sudo mv /opt/vagrant/embedded/lib/libcurl.so.4.4.0{,.backup} # sudo mv /opt/vagrant/embedded/lib/pkgconfig/libcurl.pc{,backup}

Then build the plugin.

# vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt

Hugepages

Enabling hugepages can improve the performance of virtual machines. First add an entry to the fstab, make sure to first check what the group id of the group kvm is.

# grep kvm /etc/group # sudoedit /etc/fstab

filename: /etc/fstab

hugetlbfs /dev/hugepages hugetlbfs mode=1770,gid=999 0 0

Instead of rebooting, remount instead.

# sudo umount /dev/hugepages # mount /dev/hugepages

This can then be verified.

# sudo mount | grep huge # ls -FalG /dev/ | grep huge

Now to set the number of hugepages to use. For this one has to do a bit of math, for each gigabyte of the system RAM that you want to use for VMs you divide the size in megabytes by two.

On my setup I will dedicated 12GB out of the 16GB of system RAM to VMs. This means (12 * 1024) / 2 or 6144

Set the number of hugepages.

# echo 6144 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages

Also set this permanently by adding a file to /etc/sysctl.d.

filename: /etc/sysctl.d/40-hugepages.conf

vm.nr_hugepages = 6144

Again verify the changes.

# grep HugePages_Total /proc/meminfo

KVM User

Finally create a user for KVM.

# sudo useradd -g kvm -s /usr/bin/nologin kvm

Then modify the libvirt QEMU config to reflect this.

filename: /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf

user = "kvm" group = "kvm"

Packer

Packer is a tool for automating the creating of virtual machines, in this instance it will be used to automate the creation of Vagrant boxes. I have already taken the time to create a packer template for Arch Linux based off of my installation tutorials, but I encourage you to use this only as a basis and delve deeper to create your own templates. I could have very easily just have downloaded someone elses templates but I would then not understand how they work.

GitHub: kyau/packer-kvm-templates

The Packer templates are in JSON format and contain all of the information needed to create the virtual machine image. Descriptions of all the template sections and values, including default values, can be found in the Packer docs. For Arch Linux, the template file archlinux-x86_64-base-vagrant.json will be used to generate an Arch Linux qcow2 virtual machine image.

To explain the template a bit, inside of the builders section the template is specifying that it is a qcow2 image running on QEMU KVM. A few settings are being imported from user variables that are being set in the previous section, this includes the ISO url and checksum, the country setting, disk space for the VMs primary hard drive, the amount of RAM to dedicate to the VM, how many vCores to dedicated to the VM, whether or not it is a headless VM or not, and the login and password for the primary SSH user. These are all exported as user variables and placed in a section at the top to make quick editing faster. The template also specifies that the VM should use virtio for the disk and network interfaces. This leaves us with the builtin web server in Packer and the boot commands. The http_directory specifies which directory will be the main root of the builtin web server which enables one to host files up for the VM to access during installation. The boot_command is an array of commands that are to be executed upon boot in order to kick-start the installer. Finally, the qemuargs should be rather apparent as they are the arguments passed to QEMU.