User VMs¶

User VMs are deployed on aperture using nomad's QEMU driver.

Each VM is configured with cloud-init. Those configuration files are served by wheatley, but they can be served by any HTTP server.

Setting up Networking on the Host¶

The host needs to be configured to allow the VMs to communicate with each other. This is done by creating a bridge and adding the VMs to it.

Create a Bridge¶

To create a bridge that qemu can use to place the guest (VM) onto the same network as the host, follow the instructions listed here for iproute2, summarised below.

We need to create a bridge interface on the host.

Bash

sudo ip link add name br0 type bridge
sudo ip link set dev br0 up

We'll be adding a physical interface to this bridge to allow it to communicate with the external (UDM) network.

Bash

sudo ip link set eno1 master br0

You'll need to assign an IP address to the bridge interface. This will be used as the default address for the host. You can do this with DHCP or by assigning a static IP address. The best way to do this is to create a DHCP static lease on the UDM for the bridge interface MAC address.

Note

TODO: Find out why connectivity seems to be lost when the bridge interface receives an address before the physical interface.
If connectivity is lost, release the addresses from both the bridge and the physical interface (in that order) with sudo dhclient -v -r <iface> and then run sudo dhclient -v <iface> to assign the bridge interface an address.

Add the VMs to the Bridge¶

The configuration of the qemu network options in the job file will create a new tap interface and add it to the bridge and the VM. I advise you for your own sanity to never touch the network options, they will only cause you pain.

For others looking, this configuration is specific to QEMU only.

Bash

qemu-system-x86_64 ... -netdev bridge,id=hn0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=hn0,id=nic1

This will assign the VM an address on the external network. The VM will be able to communicate with the host and other VMs in the network.

You must also add allow br0 to /etc/qemu/bridge.conf to allow qemu to add the tap interfaces to the bridge. Source

The VMs, once connected to the bridge, will be assigned an address via DHCP. You can assign a static IP address to the VMs by adding a DHCP static lease on the UDM for the VMs MAC address. You can get the address of a VM by checking the nomad alloc logs for that VM and searching for ens3.

Bash

nomad job status distro-vm | grep "Node ID" -A 1 | tail -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 1
# <alloc-id>
nomad alloc logs <alloc-id> | grep -E "ens3.*global" | cut -d "|" -f 4 | xargs
# cloud init... ens3: <ip-address> global

Configuring the VMs¶

The VMs are configured with cloud-init. Their docs are pretty good, so I won't repeat them here. The files can be served by any HTTP server, and the address is placed into the job file in the QEMU options.

Nomad

...
        args = [
          ...
          "virtio-net-pci,netdev=hn0,id=nic1,mac=52:54:84:ba:49:22", # make sure this MAC address is unique!!
          "-smbios",
          "type=1,serial=ds=nocloud-net;s=http://136.206.16.5:8000/",
        ]
...

Here in the args block:

we define that the VM will have a network device using the virtio driver, we pass it an id and a random unique MAC address
we tell it to use smbios type 1 and to grab its cloud-init configs from http://136.206.16.5:8000/

Note

If you're running multiple VMs on the same network make sure to set different MAC addresses for each VM, otherwise you'll have a bad time.

Creating a New VM¶

To create a new VM, you'll need to create a new job file and a cloud-init configuration file. Copy any of the existing job files and modify them to suit your needs. The cloud-init configuration files can be copied and changed based on the user also. Remember to ensure the MAC addresses are unique!