applechaning / vm

Package and Run Virtual Machines as Docker Containers

RancherVM

Package and run KVM images as Kubernetes pods, run at scale.

How It Works

RancherVM allows you to create VMs that run inside of Kubernetes pods, called VM Pods. A VM pod looks and feels like a regular pod. Inside of each VM pod, however, is a container running a virtual machine instance. You can package any QEMU/KVM image as a Docker image, distribute it using any Docker registry such as DockerHub, and run it on RancherVM.

RancherVM extends the Kubernetes API with Custom Resource Definitions, or CRDs. Users define a VirtualMachine CRD specification detailing what base image, how much compute resources and what keypairs are authorized to open an SSH session. A Kubernetes controller creates VM pods as necessary to achieve the desired specification and reflects this in the VirtualMachine CRD status.

RancherVM comes with a Web UI for managing public keys, compute nodes, virtual machines and accessing the VNC console from a web browser.

Run

Create a Kubernetes 1.8+ cluster and ensure KVM is installed on all nodes. Follow the distribution-specific instructions to ensure KVM works. We only require KVM to be enabled in the kernel. We do not need any user space tools like qemu-kvm or libvirt. On Ubuntu 14.04, you can make sure KVM is enabled by checking that both devices /dev/kvm and /dev/net/tun exist.

An easy way to run KVM on your Windows or Mac laptop is to use nested virtualization with VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion. Just enable "Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI" in VM settings.

Once you have Kubernetes and KVM both setup, deploy the system:

kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rancher/vm/master/hack/deploy.yaml

To determine the Web UI address, query for the frontend service:

kubectl get svc/ranchervm-frontend --namespace=ranchervm-system

This will return information on the frontend NodePort service similar to this:

NAME                 TYPE       CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGE
ranchervm-frontend   NodePort   10.99.175.219   <none>        8000:32504/TCP   5h

Point your browser to http://<node_ip>:32504, replacing node_ip with the IP address of any node in the cluster and 32504 with the external port you found in the previous step.

You can create VM Pods through the Web UI or by creating Credential and VirtualMachine CRDs:

kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rancher/vm/master/hack/example/credentials.yaml
kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rancher/vm/master/hack/example/virtualmachine.yaml

RancherVM is comprised of two Kubernetes controllers and a Web UI. Users may manage VM Pods using the UI, by making API calls to the REST server backend, or by directly creating/modifying CRDs.

Build VM Images

You can find instructions on how to build images, including Windows images, in the RancherVM Images document.

Networking

The details of how RancherVM configures network for the VM Pod is documented in RancherVM Networking.

Build from Source

Just type make

RancherVM uses a modified version of noVNC at https://github.com/rancher/noVNC.