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Creating Virtual Machines from local images with CDI and virtctl

Creating Virtual Machines from local images with CDI and virtctl

The Containerized Data Importer (CDI) project provides facilities for enabling Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) to be used as disks for KubeVirt VMs. The three main CDI use cases are:

  • Import a disk image from a URL to a PVC (HTTP/S3)

  • Clone an an existing PVC

  • Upload a local disk image to a PVC

This document deals with the third use case. So you should have CDI installed in your cluster, a VM disk that you’d like to upload, and virtctl in your path.

Install CDI

Install the latest CDI release here (currently v1.3.0)

VERSION=v1.3.0
kubectl create -f https://github.com/kubevirt/containerized-data-importer/releases/download/$VERSION/cdi-controller.yaml

Expose cdi-uploadproxy service

The cdi-uploadproxy service must be accessible from outside the cluster. Here are some ways to do that:

Look here for example manifests.

Supported image formats

  • .img

  • .iso

  • .qcow2

  • compressed .tar, .gz, and .xz versions of above supported as well

Example in this doc uses this CirrOS image

virtctl image-upload

virtctl has an image-upload command with the following options:

virtctl image-upload --help
Upload a VM image to a PersistentVolumeClaim.

Usage:
  virtctl image-upload [flags]

Examples:
  # Upload a local disk image to a newly created PersistentVolumeClaim:
    virtctl image-upload --upload-proxy-url=https://cdi-uploadproxy.mycluster.com --pvc-name=upload-pvc --pvc-size=10Gi --image-path=/images/fedora28.qcow2

Flags:
      --access-mode string       The access mode for the PVC. (default "ReadWriteOnce")
  -h, --help                     help for image-upload
      --image-path string        Path to the local VM image.
      --insecure                 Allow insecure server connections when using HTTPS.
      --no-create                Don't attempt to create a new PVC.
      --pvc-name string          The destination PVC.
      --pvc-size string          The size of the PVC to create (ex. 10Gi, 500Mi).
      --storage-class string     The storage class for the PVC.
      --uploadproxy-url string   The URL of the cdi-upload proxy service.
      --wait-secs uint           Seconds to wait for upload pod to start. (default 60)

Use "virtctl options" for a list of global command-line options (applies to all commands).

`virtctl image-upload'' works by creating a PVC of the requested size, sending an `UploadTokenRequest to the cdi-apiserver, and uploading the file to the cdi-uploadproxy.

virtctl image-upload --pvc-name=cirros-vm-disk --pvc-size=500Mi --image-path=/home/mhenriks/images/cirros-0.4.0-x86_64-disk.img --uploadproxy-url=<url to upload proxy service>

Create a VirtualMachineInstance

To create a VirtualMachinInstance from a PVC, you can execute the following:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: kubevirt.io/v1alpha2
kind: VirtualMachineInstance
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: null
  name: cirros-vm
spec:
  domain:
    devices:
      disks:
      - disk:
          bus: virtio
        name: pvcdisk
        volumeName: pvcvolume
    machine:
      type: ""
    resources:
      requests:
        memory: 64M
  terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 0
  volumes:
  - name: pvcvolume
    persistentVolumeClaim:
      claimName: cirros-vm-disk
status: {}
EOF

Connect to VirtualMachineInstance console

Use virtctl to connect to the newly create VirtualMachinInstance.

virtctl console cirros-vm