mikrolite - the microvm cli

mikrolite is a tool that can be used to create and manage microvms from the command line. Its aim is to make working with microvms easy from the command line.

NOTE: this is very much a prototype.

What are microvms?

In this instance, the term microvm refers to lightweight virtualisation. And more specifically 2 implementions:

• Firecracker
• Cloud Hypervisor

Both of these are supported by mikrolite.

Requirements

• Linux host machine with kvm
• containerd with the devmapper snapshotter plugin enabled & configured
• Either or both of these:
  • Firecracker (tested with v1.5.0)
  • Cloud Hypervisor (tested with v36)

This is an example of the configuration section that will need to be added to your container config:

[plugins]
  [plugins."io.containerd.snapshotter.v1.devmapper"]
    pool_name = "development-thinpool"
    root_path = "/var/lib/containerd-dev/snapshotter/devmapper"
    base_image_size = "10GB"
    discard_blocks = true

Very basic usage

To create a VM using Firecracker

sudo ./mikrolite vm create --name node1 --root-image ghcr.io/mikrolite/node-rke2-airgapped:dev --kernel-image ghcr.io/mikrolite/firecracker-kernel:5.10 --kernel-filename boot/vmlinux --provider firecracker --firecracker-bin /path/to/firecracker-v1.5.0-x86_64 --network-bridge virbr0 --ssh-key /home/user/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

Currently the bridge needs to exist before running the create command. The easiest way to do this is using virt-manager or virsh as this will setup iptables etc.

After the VM boots you should be able to connect to the vm via SSH:

ssh ml@<IP_OF_VM>

To get a list of vms:

sudo ./mikrolite vm list

Contributing

We'd love your help on this via issues, PRs etc.