Vagrant and libvirt (Holy Grail?)

After looking at the vagrant-kvm plugin I found a list of all the Vagrant plugins. This turns out to have vagrant-libvirt as a plugin. libvirt is a library used to control many different virtualization technologies. You can think of it as a common API for hypervisors like KVM/QEMU, Xen, LXC, OpenVZ, Virtualbox, VMware, and Hyper-V. From my experience with OpenStack, I quickly understood the power of this plugin.

In the README for vargrant-libvirt it explains the installation process very clearly. One of the things that makes vagrant really nice now is that you can setup simple puppet or chef provisioning to the instance that you create. It is just a simple configuration change to the Vagrantfile and you are on your way.

Here is the base Vagrantfile for libvirt.

Openstack - Running Devstack in VMWare with Ubuntu and KVM faster!

After creating an Ubuntu 12.04 Precise default install on my VMware Fusion I noticed that the performance was never up to par to do development. I found later that there were some missing options that will allow the virtual machine to be much more performant.

Here is what I did to make a build go from about 10 minutes to about 2 minutes.

Shutdown the Ubuntu VM.

Go to the VM Settings -> Processors & Memory -> Advanced Options

Check the "Enable hypervisor applications in this virtual machine"

There is one other option that may improve your performance overall as well.

Updating the Troubleshooting option is optional as it may cover up CPU lock up issues that I have seen in VMware.

Go to the VM Settings -> Advanced 

Set the "Troubleshooting" option to "None"

I would suggest after setting these create a snapshot so that in cases where things break down you can revert to a clean snapshot.

Boot up the VM and run the devstack installation.

http://devstack.org/

To verify that KVM is setup properly after the devstack installation you can run these commands.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ kvm-ok 

INFO: /dev/kvm exists

KVM acceleration can be used