Vagrant-kvm in Ubuntu 13.10

May 13, 2014

Vagrant is very valuable tool for every developer who would like to automate creation of testing environments. I wanted to use it on my development Linux machine, but it is primarly written for Virtualbox. Because I used to use kvm hypervisor and I didn’t want to mix different virtualization platforms on my development machine, I was looking for a tool which can provision VMs in KVM as simple as Vagrant can. Finally I found plugin for vagrant called vagrant-kvm, which can utilize KVM for virtualization, yet use Vagrant comfort and simplicity.

Install vagrant

I downloaded and installed most recent Vagrant version (1.6.2 x64) of .deb package for Ubuntu directly from Vagrant downloads page.

# cd ~/Downloads
# dpkg -i vagrant_1.6.2_x86_64

Then I installed kvm plugin

# vagrant plugin install vagrant-kvm

Installation of plugin was unsuccessful, with following error:

An error occurred while installing ruby-libvirt (0.4.0), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that `gem install ruby-libvirt -v '0.4.0'` succeeds before bundling.

I solved the issue by installing libvirt-dev package

# apt-get install libvirt-dev

After this, plugin was installed successfuly.

Get Vagrant KVM image

It is not possible to use Vagrant images prepared for Virtualbox, so we have to convert images for KVM, or download already prepared images.

I downloaded KVM box directly from KVM Boxes Github page

# vagrant box add trusty64 https://vagrant-kvm-boxes-si.s3.amazonaws.com/trusty64-kvm-20140418.box
# vagrant box list
trusty64 (kvm, 0)

Now, we can prepare Vagrantfile where we have VM configuration

# nano Vagrantfile

and put there following lines

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "trusty64"
  config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.123.10"
end

This file specifies that we want to run trusty64 box and it’ll have internal IP address 192.168.123.10.

Now run following command to run this machine in directory where you have Vagrantfile file:

# vagrant up --provider=kvm
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'kvm' provider...
==> default: Importing base box 'trusty64'...
==> default: Matching MAC address for NAT networking...
==> default: Preparing network interfaces based on configuration...
==> default: Booting VM...
==> default: Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes...
    default: SSH address: 192.168.123.10:22
    default: SSH username: vagrant
    default: SSH auth method: private key
    default: Warning: Connection timeout. Retrying...
==> default: Machine booted and ready!
==> default: Creating shared folders metadata...
==> default: Rsyncing folder: /home/kmadac/vagrant/ => /vagrant

# vagrant ssh
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-24-generic x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/
Last login: Sat Apr 19 01:03:51 2014 from 10.0.2.2
vagrant@ubuntu-14:~$

and we are in our new Ubuntu 14.04 server machine :-)

We have to specify provider otherwise we will get error message that VirtualBox is not installed. There is also possibility to specify default provider. Set environment variable VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER to kvm and you don’t need to specify provider on command line.

export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=kvm

Now we can simply run

# vagrant up

and our VM will be provisioned by vagrant using KVM.

If you want destroy the VM, run

# vagrant destroy

How to convert Virtualbox image to KVM

I tried to convert existing images with vagrant-mutate plugin, but it always finished with error:

# vagrant mutate precise32 kvm
Vagrant-mutate does not support 0 for input or output

It seems it is incompatibility between Vagrant 1.6.2 and mutate plugin. I opened issue #55 and author of plugin recommended to upgrade mutate plugin to version 0.3.0. Version 0.3.0 was not uploaded in rubygems, so I cloned vagrant-mutable github repo, generated gem package and installed it:

cd /tmp; git clone https://github.com/sciurus/vagrant-mutate.git
cd vagrant-mutate
rake build
cd pkg
vagrant plugin install vagrant-mutate-0.3.0.gem

After upgrade of plugin, I addded Virtualbox image from Vagrantbox.es

# vagrant box add saucy64 http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/vagrant/saucy/current/saucy-server-cloudimg-amd64-vagrant-disk1.box
==> box: Adding box 'saucy64' (v0) for provider: 
    box: Downloading: http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/vagrant/saucy/current/saucy-server-cloudimg-amd64-vagrant-disk1.box
==> box: Successfully added box 'saucy64' (v0) for 'virtualbox'!

# vagrant box list
saucy64  (virtualbox, 0)
trusty64 (kvm, 0)

Now we are ready to convert saucy64 from virtualbox to kvm

# vagrant mutate saucy64 kvm
Converting saucy64 from virtualbox to kvm.
    (100.00/100%)
The box saucy64 (kvm) is now ready to use.

# vagrant box list
saucy64  (kvm, 0)
saucy64  (virtualbox, 0)
trusty64 (kvm, 0)

Now, we can prepare Vagrantfile for sauce64 and run it with

vagrant up