InfraKit Instance Plugin for VMWare Fusion

Status

POC only.

This is a proof of concept of an instance plugin for InfraKit. Currently you can use this plugin with a plain vanilla flavor plugin and the default group plugin to manage a group of VMs via VMWare Fusion (which runs on the Mac and Windows). You can scale up/down and suspend VM instances and see new instances get created to ensure group size.

This is built on VIX using an open source Golang C-binding of the API. So building and running requires some special care (for cgo and requires dynamic linking).

VM instances are created by 'cloning' an existing vmx file. VMX files are expected to be stored on disk as children in the top level directory specified by the --vm-lib flag on start up of the plugin.

States of indivdual VM instances are stored as subdirectories of a top level directory specified by the --vm-dir flag on startup of the plugin.

You can create your own VM using whatever image you want. Then copy the whole directory (using the ${name}.vmwarevm) into the vm lib folder (see ./vmx). Then in your JSON, just reference this basename of the vmx. See example below.

Limitations / Next Steps

Currently, it's not possible to perform cloudinit-like execution of init scripts unless they are baked into the image. It would be nice to be able to inject the scripts via the Flavor plugin, but the VIX API requires the VM Tools drivers or Open VM Tools (for example, on Alpine Open VM Tools) package to be installed in the image.

References

• rancher/os#219
• https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/main/x86/open-vm-tools
• https://github.com/higebu/packer-alpine/blob/master/scripts/provisioning.sh

Building

make plugins

This will put a binary in build

Note that there are some ISOs missing and you need to make sure they are in the iso/ directory.

make vmx-alpine

will download an iso image from alpine repo and place that in the iso/ directory. A .vmx file will be generated off the template using the absolute path of the iso file.

If you have access to mobylinux, change the Makefile to clone from the correct repo, and run make qemu-iso. Place the built iso in the iso/ directory and do

make vmx-moby

This will generate a vmx file using the correct absolute path that points to the mobylinux iso.

Running

For Go 1.6 or above -- You need to set an environment variable to disable cgo's dynamic checking.

export GODEBUG=cgocheck=0

# On OSX
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(pwd)/vendor/libvix

# On linux
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(pwd)/vendor/libvix

From the current directory (repo root), run

./build/infrakit-instance-vmware-fusion --log=5 --vm-dir=./vms --vm-lib=./vmx

The flag --vm-dir is where the vm instances will be placed (their state, vmdk, etc.), and --vm-lib is the top level directory where templated vmx directories are.

When the plugin provisions a new instance, it uses the VMX field in the config and the --vm-lib flag to determine where the VMX file can be found. It uses this rule... Given the --vm-lib flag as ${vmlib} and the VMX field in the following JSON for managing a group (using the default group plugin and vanilla flavor):

{
    "ID": "vmware_fusion_demo",
    "Properties": {
        "Instance" : {
            "Plugin": "vmware-fusion",
            "Properties": {
                "Tags" : {
                    "env" : "dev",
                    "instance-plugin" : "fusion"
                },
                "VMX" : "alpine-3.4.4",
                "MemorySizeMBs" : 512,
                "NumCPUs" : 2,
                "LaunchGUI" : true
            }
        },
        "Flavor" : {
            "Plugin": "flavor-vanilla",
            "Properties": {
                "Size" : 5
            }
        }
    }
}

The VMX file path will be computed as ${vmlib}/${VMX}.vmwarevm/${VMX}.vmx.

Once the VMX file is located, it is cloned to provision a new instance. The state of the new VM will be placed in the --vm-dir subdirectory.

This provides a simple mechanism for supporting different image types.