--- title: "Create Virtual Machines on a Chromebook with HashiCorp Vagrant" # Title of the blog post. date: 2023-02-20 # Date of post creation. # lastmod: 2023-02-18T17:22:02-06:00 # Date when last modified description: "Pairing the powerful Linux Development Environment on modern Chromebooks with HashiCorp Vagrant to create and manage local virtual machines for development and testing" # Description used for search engine. featured: false # Sets if post is a featured post, making appear on the home page side bar. draft: false # Sets whether to render this page. Draft of true will not be rendered. toc: true # Controls if a table of contents should be generated for first-level links automatically. usePageBundles: true # menu: main # featureImage: "file.png" # Sets featured image on blog post. # featureImageAlt: 'Description of image' # Alternative text for featured image. # featureImageCap: 'This is the featured image.' # Caption (optional). thumbnail: "thumbnail.png" # Sets thumbnail image appearing inside card on homepage. # shareImage: "share.png" # Designate a separate image for social media sharing. codeLineNumbers: false # Override global value for showing of line numbers within code block. series: Projects tags: - linux - chromeos - homelab - infrastructure-as-code comment: true # Disable comment if false. --- I've lately been trying to do more with [Salt](https://saltproject.io/) at work, but I'm still very much a novice with that tool. I thought it would be great to have a nice little portable lab environment where I could deploy a few lightweight VMs and practice managing them with Salt - without impacting any systems that are actually being used for anything. Along the way, I figured I'd leverage [HashiCorp Vagrant](https://www.vagrantup.com/) to create and manage the VMs, which would provide a declarative way to define what the VMs should look like. That will make it easy to build up, destroy, and redeploy a development environment in a simple, repeatable way. Also, because I'm a bit of a sadist, I wanted to do this all on my new [Framework Chromebook](https://frame.work/laptop-chromebook-12-gen-intel). I might as well put my 32GB of RAM to good use, right? It took a bit of fumbling, but this article describes what it took to get a Vagrant-powered VM up and running in the [Linux Development Environment](https://chromeos.dev/en/linux) on my Chromebook (which is currently running ChromeOS v111 beta). ### Install the prerequisites There are are a few packages which need to be installed before we can move on to the Vagrant-specific stuff. It's quite possible that these are already on your system.... but if they *aren't* already present you'll have a bad problem[^problem]. ```shell sudo apt update sudo apt install \ build-essential \ gpg \ lsb-release \ wget ``` [^problem]: and [will not go to space today](https://xkcd.com/1133/). I'll be configuring Vagrant to use [`libvirt`](https://libvirt.org/) to interface with the [Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM)](https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page) virtualization solution (rather than something like VirtualBox that would bring more overhead) so I'll need to install some packages for that as well: ```shell sudo apt install virt-manager libvirt-dev ``` And to avoid having to `sudo` each time I interact with `libvirt` I'll add myself to that group: ```shell sudo gpasswd -a $USER libvirt ; newgrp libvirt ``` And to avoid [this issue](https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/issues/333) I'll make a tweak to the `qemu.conf` file: ```shell echo "remember_owner = 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf sudo systemctl restart libvirtd ``` I'm also going to use `rsync` to share a [synced folder](https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant/docs/synced-folders/basic_usage) between the host and the VM guest so I'll need to make sure that's installed too: ```shell sudo apt install rsync ``` ### Install Vagrant With that out of the way, I'm ready to move on to the business of installing Vagrant. I'll start by adding the HashiCorp repository: ```shell wget -O- https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list ``` I'll then install the Vagrant package: ```shell sudo apt update sudo apt install vagrant ``` I also need to install the [`vagrant-libvirt` plugin](https://github.com/vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt) so that Vagrant will know how to interact with `libvirt`: ```shell vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt ``` ### Create a lightweight VM Now I can get to the business of creating my first VM with Vagrant! Vagrant VMs are distributed as Boxes, and I can browse some published Boxes at [app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search?provider=libvirt](https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search?provider=libvirt) (applying the `provider=libvirt` filter so that I only see Boxes which will run on my chosen virtualization provider). For my first VM, I'll go with something light and simple: [`generic/alpine38`](https://app.vagrantup.com/generic/boxes/alpine38). So I'll create a new folder to contain the Vagrant configuration: ```shell mkdir vagrant-alpine cd vagrant-alpine ``` And since I'm referencing a Vagrant Box which is published on Vagrant Cloud, downloading the config is as simple as: ```shell vagrant init generic/alpine38 ``` That lets me know that ```text A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. You are now ready to `vagrant up` your first virtual environment! Please read the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on `vagrantup.com` for more information on using Vagrant. ``` Before I `vagrant up` the joint, I do need to make a quick tweak to the default Vagrantfile, which is what tells Vagrant how to configure the VM. By default, Vagrant will try to create a synced folder using NFS and will throw a nasty error when that (inevitably[^inevitable]) fails. So I'll open up the Vagrantfile to review and edit it: ```shell vim Vagrantfile ``` Most of the default Vagrantfile is commented out. Here's the entirey of the configuration *without* the comments: ```ruby Vagrant.configure("2") do |config| config.vm.box = "generic/alpine38" end ``` There's not a lot there, is there? Well I'm just going to add these two lines somewhere between the `Vagrant.configure()` and `end` lines: ```ruby config.nfs.verify_installed = false config.vm.synced_folder '.', '/vagrant', type: 'rsync' ``` The first line tells Vagrant not to bother checking to see if NFS is installed, and will use `rsync` to share the local directory with the VM guest, where it will be mounted at `/vagrant`. So here's the full Vagrantfile (sans-comments[^magic], again): ```ruby Vagrant.configure("2") do |config| config.vm.box = "generic/alpine38" config.nfs.verify_installed = false config.vm.synced_folder '.', '/vagrant', type: 'rsync' end ``` With that, I'm ready to fire up this VM with `vagrant up`! Vagrant will look inside `Vagrantfile` to see the config, pull down the `generic/alpine38` Box from Vagrant Cloud, boot the VM, configure it so I can SSH in to it, and mount the synced folder: ```shell ; vagrant up Bringing machine 'default' up with 'libvirt' provider... ==> default: Box 'generic/alpine38' could not be found. Attempting to find and install... default: Box Provider: libvirt default: Box Version: >= 0 ==> default: Loading metadata for box 'generic/alpine38' default: URL: https://vagrantcloud.com/generic/alpine38 ==> default: Adding box 'generic/alpine38' (v4.2.12) for provider: libvirt default: Downloading: https://vagrantcloud.com/generic/boxes/alpine38/versions/4.2.12/providers/libvirt.box default: Calculating and comparing box checksum... ==> default: Successfully added box 'generic/alpine38' (v4.2.12) for 'libvirt'! ==> default: Uploading base box image as volume into Libvirt storage... [...] ==> default: Waiting for domain to get an IP address... ==> default: Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes... default: SSH address: 192.168.121.41:22 default: SSH username: vagrant default: SSH auth method: private key [...] default: Key inserted! Disconnecting and reconnecting using new SSH key... ==> default: Machine booted and ready! ==> default: Rsyncing folder: /home/john/projects/vagrant-alpine/ => /vagrant ``` And then I can use `vagrant ssh` to log in to the new VM: ```shell ; vagrant ssh alpine38:~$ cat /etc/os-release NAME="Alpine Linux" ID=alpine VERSION_ID=3.8.5 PRETTY_NAME="Alpine Linux v3.8" HOME_URL="http://alpinelinux.org" BUG_REPORT_URL="http://bugs.alpinelinux.org" ``` I can also verify that the synced folder came through as expected: ```shell alpine38:~$ ls -l /vagrant total 4 -rw-r--r-- 1 vagrant vagrant 3117 Feb 20 15:51 Vagrantfile ``` Once I'm finished poking at this VM, shutting it down is as easy as: ```shell vagrant halt ``` And if I want to clean up and remove all traces of the VM, that's just: ```shell vagrant destroy ``` [^inevitable]: NFS doesn't work properly from within an LXD container, like the ChromeOS Linux development environment. [^magic]: Through the magic of `egrep -v "^\s*(#|$)" $file`. ### Create a heavy VM, as a treat Having proven to myself that Vagrant does work on a Chromebook, let's see how it does with a slightly-heavier VM.... like [Windows 11](https://app.vagrantup.com/oopsme/boxes/windows11-22h2). Again, I'll create a new folder to hold the Vagrant configuration and do a `vagrant init`: ```shell mkdir vagrant-win11 cd vagrant-win11 vagrant init oopsme/windows11-22h2 ``` And, again, I'll edit the Vagrantfile before starting the VM. This time, though, I'm adding a few configuration options to tell `libvirt` that I'd like more compute resources than the default 1 CPU and 512MB RAM: ```ruby Vagrant.configure("2") do |config| config.vm.box = "oopsme/windows11-22h2" config.vm.provider :libvirt do |libvirt| libvirt.cpus = 4 libvirt.memory = 4096 end end ``` Now it's time to bring it up. This one's going to take A While as it syncs the ~6GB Box first. ```shell vagrant up ``` Eventually it should spit out that lovely **Machine booted and ready!** message and I can log in! I *can* do a `vagrant ssh` again to gain a shell in the Windows environment, but I'll probably want to interact with those sweet sweet graphics. That takes a little bit more effort. First, I'll use `virsh -c qemu:///system list` to see the running VM(s): ```shell ; virsh -c qemu:///system list Id Name State --------------------------------------- 10 vagrant-win11_default running ``` Then I can tell `virt-viewer` that I'd like to attach a session there: ```shell virt-viewer -c qemu:///system -a vagrant-win11_default ``` I log in with the default password `vagrant`, and I'm in Windows 11 land! ![Windows 11 running on a Chromebook!](win-11-vm.png) ### Next steps Well that about does it for a proof-of-concept. My next steps will be exploring [multi-machine Vagrant environments](https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant/docs/multi-machine) to create a portable lab environment including machines running several different operating systems so that I can learn how to manage them effectively with Salt. It should be fun!