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Environments.md

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Setup | Shells | Markdown and IDEs | Git |Virtual Environments | Task Management | Advanced Shells

Virtualization

Virtual machines/containers can provide a useful solution for automating the creation and management of your computing environment and development workflow. Unfortunately, when developers think about virtual machines, a common idea that comes to mind is a dedicated heavy-weight virtualized system with a full graphics Desktop. Alternatively, you may think of dual-booted systems. While these types of systems can be useful, in this context, we will largely be talking about headless virtual machines, which are more directly useful for automating infrastructure tasks and supporting large-scale software development.

Setting up Virtualization

VirtualBox is an ubiquitous virtualization provider for Intel-based machines. It is very effective for creating headless virtual machines that run without any GUI/Desktop interface.

Install VirtualBox.

choco install virtualbox -y

brew cask install virtualbox

Mac: virtualbox requires a kernel extension to work. If the installation fails, retry after you enable it in: System Preferences → Security & Privacy → General

Ensure virtualization is enabled

To be able to run virtual machines, your machine needs to support virtualization. Ensure virtualization (Intel VT-x or AMD-V) is enabled on your system using the instructions for your operating system:

  • Windows: open Task Manager and go to Performance tab, and you should see virtualization is enabled.

  • Mac: run the command below to see the list of supported CPU flags. If you see VMX, your machine supports hardware virtualization:

    sysctl -a | grep machdep.cpu.features | grep VMX

  • Linux: run the command below to see the list of supported CPU flags. If you see VMX or SVM flag, youre machine supports hardware virtualization:

    grep -E "vmx|svm" /proc/cpuinfo

Debugging virtualization issues

Windows: If you're running Hyper-V and VirtualBox, and you're experiencing crashes when you try to start a VM, you may need to turn off Hyper-V (which exclusively locks use of CPU for virtualization).

These commands will enable to you to toggle on/off hyper-v as needed. However, a restart may be necessary after running the command.

To disable hyper-v:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

To re-enable:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

Linux: If you run vboxmanage list vms command and you get WARNING: The vboxdrv kernel module is not loaded... error, see the dicussion here for how to fix it.

M1 Machines?

If you're a Mac-M1 ("Apple Silcon") machine, they you're CPU is arm-based and not Intel/Amd. As a result, virtualization tools such as VirtualBox will not work on your machine!

Luckily, you can take advantage of the virtualization framework, which allows you to create virtual machines using MacOS. Unfortunately, there are limited tools that support this framework---yet. Keep posted!

Creating a Virtual Machine

While it is possible to use the VirtualBox GUI to manually install a virtual machine (and run through the OS installation script); this is not an effective automation approach!

Install bakerx

bakerx is a simple tool for creating and managing virtual machines.

npm install ottomatica/bakerx -g

Using bakerx

Pulling images

First, you need to pull an existing virtual machine image from a registry. Registries are basically the assets in a GitHub repository releases. Then you can pull an image by running the following commands:

bakerx pull focal cloud-images.ubuntu.com

Creating VMs

After pulling images, you can create VMs that run those images. Simply run the command below:

bakerx run v1 focal

Connecting to VMs

Finally, bakerx will give you an ssh command similar to what is shown below, which you can use to connect to the VM.

bakerx ssh v1

Deleting VMs

When you're done, you can stop and delete the VM.

bakerx delete vm v1