Vagrant KVM Provider

This is a Vagrant 1.1+ plugin that adds a KVM provider to Vagrant, allowing Vagrant to control and provision KVM/QEMU VM.

Requirements

This plugin requires QEMU 1.1+, it has only been tested on Fedora 18+, Debian Wheezy, Ubuntu 12.04(LTS) Precise and Ubuntu 13.04 Raring at the moment.

This plugin requires several library and helper utils packages. Consult the Requirements section in INSTALL.md

Recent changes

Default image format is now qcow2 instead of sparsed raw imagei, with qcow2 vagrant-kvm uses the box volume as a backing volume so that VM creation is a lot faster. In most cases you want to use qcow2.

OVF boxes conversion as been removed, you should use vagrant-mutate instead.

Features/Limitations

Provides the same workflow as the Vagrant VirtualBox provider.
Uses NFS for sync folders
Only works with 1 VM per Vagrantfile for now
Requires "libvirtd" group membership to run Vagrant (Debian/Ubuntu only)
Requires backporting qemu and libvirt from experimental (Debian) or raring (Ubuntu)
Use qcow2 backing image by default, which should make VM creation very fast

Known issues

Some versions of Ubuntu kernel has a bug that vagrant-kvm fails to do vagrant up with permission error. If you catch it, please run following command to work around. It is a kernel bug on AppArmor security framework, the command disables access control for libvirt helper.

sudo aa-complain /usr/lib/libvirt/virt-aa-helper

There is a problem in Fedora and Arch that get a permission denied messege. It happens because default user home directory has a too conservative permission: drwx------. Qemu/kvm runs as 'qemu' user in default and could not go under your home directory. It causes a permission error.

To avoid it, please check and change your home directory permission and child directories toward ~/.vagrant.d/tmp/storage-pool/

$ chmod go+x /home/<your account>

If it is no luck with permission change, You can run qemu/kvm as root user. Adding following configuration makes qemu running as root user.

/etc/libvirt/qemu.conf

user = "root"
group = "root"

Then restart libvirtd.

$ sudo systemctl restart libvirtd

Usage

Install using standard Vagrant 1.1+ plugin installation methods. After installing, vagrant up and specify the kvm provider. An example is shown below.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-kvm
$ vagrant up --provider=kvm

Of course prior to doing this, you'll need to obtain a KVM-compatible box file for Vagrant. You can convert a VirtualBox base box using vagrant-mutate https://github.com/sciurus/vagrant-mutate or see the sample box.

You will need a private network specifying an IP address in your Vagrantfile, the minimum Vagrantfile would then be:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "precise32"
  config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.192.10"
end

And then run vagrant up --provider=kvm.

If you always use kvm provider as default, please set it in your .bashrc:

export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=kvm

then you can simply run vagrant up with kvm provider.

Configuration

There are some provider specific parameter to control VM definition.

cpu_model - cpu architecture: 'i686' or 'x86_64': default is x86_64. Note that your base box should specify this.
core_number - number of cpu cores.
memory_size - memory size such as 512m, 1GiB, 100000KiB, unit is KiB if unspecified.
gui - boolean for starting VM with VNC enabled.
vnc_port - The port the VNC server listens to. Default is automatic port assignment.
vnc_autoport - if true, KVM will automatically assign a port for VNC to listen to. Defaults to false, but the default vnc_port is -1, which results in this flag being automatically turned on by KVM.
vnc_password - A password used to protect the VNC session.
image_type - an image format for vm disk: 'raw' or 'qcow2': default is "qcow2" When choosing 'raw', vagrant-kvm always convert box image into storage-pool, which consumes disk space and is a longer process. Recommendation is 'qcow2'.
machine_type - The type of machine to boot. Default is pc-1.2.
network_model - The model of the network adapter you want to use. Defaults to virtio. Can be set to :default if you want to use the KVM default setting. Possible values include: ne2k_isa i82551 i82557b i82559er ne2k_pci pcnet rtl8139 e1000 virtio.
video_model - The model of the video adapter. Default to cirrus. Can also be set to vga.
image_mode - Possible value are clone or cow, defaults to cow. If set to clone, the image disk will be copied rather than use the original box image. This is slower but allows multiple VMs to be booted at the same time.
force_pause - use pause for vagrant suspend instead of suspend. It keeps resource online but execution is stopped. When VM has a device that is not supported hibernate, automatically use pause regardless of this.

Comparison with Vagrant-libvirt

Vagrant-kvm is a KVM/Qemu provider for single local host. Vagrant-kvm is simple, local host only, qemu/kvm only provider that is intend to alternate VirtualBox with KVM/Qemu in same work flow.

Vagrant-libvirt is a libvirt provider to control machines via libvirt toolkit. Vagrant-libvirt is, in design, for local and remote hosts and multiple hypervisors, such as Xen, LXC and KVM/qemu.

In early 2014, Varant-libvirt only support kvm/qemu in local host, there is no big feature difference.

In technical view, vagrant-kvm control kvm/qemu via ruby-libvirt,libvirt and qemu.

In contrast, vagrant-libvirt control machines via fog, a cloud abstraction library in ruby, that is also used by vagrant-aws. A fog library control virtual machines on supported platforms and provide control of qemu/kvm machines through ruby-libvirt and libvirt.

JonThorK/vagrant-kvm