HOWTO: Launch an Ubuntu Cloud Image with KVM from the Command Line

I reinstalled my primary laptop (Lenovo x250) about 3 months ago (June 30, 2016), when I got a shiny new SSD, with a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 LTS image.

Just yesterday, I needed to test something in KVM.  Something that could only be tested in KVM.

kirkland@x250:~⟫ kvm
The program 'kvm' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt install qemu-kvm
127 kirkland@x250:~⟫ 

I don't have KVM installed?  How is that even possible?  I used to be the maintainer of the virtualization stack in Ubuntu (kvm, qemu, libvirt, virt-manager, et al.)!  I lived and breathed virtualization on Ubuntu for years...

Alas, it seems that I've use LXD for everything these days!  It's built into every Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server, and one 'apt install lxd' away from having it on your desktop.  With ZFS, instances start in under 3 seconds.  Snapshots, live migration, an image store, a REST API, all built in.  Try it out, if you haven't, it's great!

kirkland@x250:~⟫ time lxc launch ubuntu:x
Creating supreme-parakeet
Starting supreme-parakeet
real    0m1.851s
user    0m0.008s
sys     0m0.000s
kirkland@x250:~⟫ lxc exec supreme-parakeet bash
root@supreme-parakeet:~# 

But that's enough of a LXD advertisement...back to the title of the blog post.

Here, I want to download an Ubuntu cloud image, and boot into it.  There's one extra step nowadays.  You need to create your "user data" and feed it into cloud-init.

First, create a simple text file, called "seed":

kirkland@x250:~⟫ cat seed
#cloud-config
password: passw0rd
chpasswd: { expire: False }
ssh_pwauth: True
ssh_import_id: kirkland

Now, generate a "seed.img" disk, like this:

kirkland@x250:~⟫ cloud-localds seed.img seed
kirkland@x250:~⟫ ls -halF seed.img 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kirkland kirkland 366K Sep 20 17:12 seed.img

Next, download your image from cloud-images.ubuntu.com:

kirkland@x250:~⟫ wget http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/xenial/current/xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img                                                                                                                                                          
--2016-09-20 17:13:57--  http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/xenial/current/xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img
Resolving cloud-images.ubuntu.com (cloud-images.ubuntu.com)... 91.189.88.141, 2001:67c:1360:8001:ffff:ffff:ffff:fffe
Connecting to cloud-images.ubuntu.com (cloud-images.ubuntu.com)|91.189.88.141|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 312606720 (298M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img’
xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img 
100%[=================================] 298.12M  3.35MB/s    in 88s     
2016-09-20 17:15:25 (3.39 MB/s) - ‘xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img’ saved [312606720/312606720]

In the nominal case, you can now just launch KVM, and add your user data as a cdrom disk.  When it boots, you can login with "ubuntu" and "passw0rd", which we set in the seed:

kirkland@x250:~⟫ kvm -cdrom seed.img -hda xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img

Finally, let's enable more bells an whistles, and speed this VM up.  Let's give it all 4 CPUs, a healthy 8GB of memory, a virtio disk, and let's port forward ssh to 2222:

kirkland@x250:~⟫ kvm -m 8192 \
    -smp 4 \
    -cdrom seed.img \
    -device e1000,netdev=user.0 \
    -netdev user,id=user.0,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:22 \
    -drive file=xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img,if=virtio,cache=writeback,index=0

And with that, we can how ssh into the VM, with the public SSH key specified in our seed:

kirkland@x250:~⟫ ssh -p 5555 ubuntu@localhost
The authenticity of host '[localhost]:5555 ([127.0.0.1]:5555)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is SHA256:w2FyU6TcZVj1WuaBA799pCE5MLShHzwio8tn8XwKSdg.
No matching host key fingerprint found in DNS.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes

Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-36-generic x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
 * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
 * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage

  Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
    http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud

0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~⟫ 

Cheers,
:-Dustin