We’re gonna see how they do that, and how we can do the same in our machine. You just select an OS, the disk size, number of CPUs, RAM, and provide an SSH key-and you get a VM up and running in less than a minute. If you’ve used cloud platforms such as EC2 and Digital Ocean, you know how fast they can provision a VM. In this way, the whole VM creation process can be automated.īut still, the installation takes quite some time, which is unacceptable in the age of cloud computing.
A sysadmin can pre-generate a file containing all the required configuration options, and these tools can read that file at install time, skipping the need for manual inputs. Here’s how automated installation tools like Preseed for Debian and derivatives, and Kickstart for RHEL and Ubuntu comes into play. In the second step, the OS installation wizard usually needs many manual inputs, which is not ideal for automation purposes.
Install an OS on the VM, from either an ISO or using PXE network boot.Create a VM from scratch by allocating a newly created blank disk image to it.The old-school, traditional way of creating virtual machines goes like the following. This is kind of a continuation of my previous post, where I explain the basics of virtualization and create a virtual machine in the old-school way. To enable audio in QEMU Virtual Machine, follow the article here.In this post, we’re going to see how we can create virtual machines in seconds, the way it’s done in modern cloud infrastructures such as EC2 and Digital Ocean. Note: For i386 architecture, we can use qemu-system-i386 command in place of qemu-system-x86_64.
In conclusion, we have discussed how to setup Virtual Machine using QEMU in Ubuntu distribution. qemu-system-x86_64 -cpu host -enable-kvm -m RAM_size -smp number_of_cores -drive file= /path/to/ disk_image,format= qcow2įor instance, qemu-system-x86_64 -cpu host - enable-kvm -m 2048 -smp 2 -drive file= /path/to/disk_image/test-img.qcow2,format= qcow2 We would just remove the CD-ROM attached.
To run a Virtual Machine, above code needs to be modified a bit. Run Virtual Machine (disk_image) through QEMU Now, install an Operating System of your choice in disk image. smp is to specify the number of cores a VM could use.įor instance, qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom /path/to/iso_image -cpu host - enable-kvm -m 2048 -smp 2 -drive file= /path/to/disk_image/test-img.qcow2,format= qcow2 There is a list of supported architectures available – qemu-system-x86_64 -cpu ? cpu host is to emulate the host processor. Hence, issue the following in terminal – qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom iso_image -cpu host -enable-kvm -m RAM_size -smp number_of_cores -drive file= disk_image,format= qcow2 So, we will attach an installation media (ISO image) to the Virtual Machine. Next, we need to install an Operating System in the disk image. Install an Operating System in Disk image This would create a file test-img.qcow2 of size 5 GB. f is used for file format (raw, qcow2 etc.)įor instance, qemu-img create -f qcow2 test-img.qcow2 5G qemu-img create -f file_format image_size With qemu-img, we can manage our disk images offline. Now, we will create a disk image using command-line utility qemu-img.
Sudo apt install qemu-kvm Create a disk image for Virtual Machine using qemu-img
So, open a terminal and issue the following – sudo apt update Thereafter, we would install the package and related dependencies (if any). Therefore, we would update the Ubuntu repository first to make the latest version of the package available. Since, QEMU package is already available in standard Ubuntu repository. In case you don’t have one, then contact your System Administrator for assistance. Note: Following operations would require you to have superuser privileges. Then, we would attach a CD-ROM (ISO Image) to the disk image to install an Operating System. In this article, we would discuss how to setup Virtual Machine using QEMU in Ubuntu distribution.įirst, we will install QEMU and create a qcow2 disk image. At the time of writing the article, the latest stable release of QEMU is 4.1.0. Hence, it is capable to run different Operating Systems and Programs on supported architectures. QEMU, released under GPLv2, supports both machine emulation as well as virtualization. Other examples of hosted hypervisors are VMware Player, Oracle VirtualBox & Parallels Desktop for Mac. QEMU (Quick EMUlator) is a type – 2 or hosted hypervisor.