NixOps/Virtualization
Disclaimer
I don't do ops for a living and my cluster only has 2 nodes. I'm not saying that this is the correct approach, just that it has worked okay for me, so far.
A Tale of Two Use-Cases
As a developer I have two primary uses for virtual machines: testing my code in an isolated environment, and then deploying it to my server(s). These have very different requirements; while testing I only want to run the VMs that I care about, and only while working on the project. On the other hand, when deploying I want to manage all guests declaratively, run everything on boot, I don't want any GUI, and preferably I'd like good support for remote console access.
NixOps's built-in VirtualBox support satisfies the testing requirements pretty well for me, so I'm going to focus on deployment in this blog post.
Requirements
As with any good project, it's vital to start out with a solid set of requirements! In my case, I wanted an a server VM environment (see above), where both the hosts and guests are managed using the awesome NixOps deployment tool. I also wanted it to be trivial to create new VMs as needed, without having to install anything manually.
The Usual NixOps Boilerplate
Before we get into virtualization we need to create a physical network description, so that NixOps can find all our hosts. We'll also create a definition of the guests we plan to run:
let
machine = {host, port ? 22, name, hostNic, guests ? {}}: {pkgs, lib, ...}@args:
{
imports = [ ./baseline.nix ];
# We still want to be able to boot, adjust as needed based on your setup
boot = {
loader = {
systemd-boot.enable = true;
efi.canTouchEfiVariables = true;
};
kernelParams = [ "nomodeset" ];
};
fileSystems = {
"/" = {
device = "/dev/disk/by-label/${name}-root";
};
"/boot" = {
device = "/dev/disk/by-label/${name}-boot";
};
};
boot.initrd.availableKernelModules = [ "xhci_pci" "ehci_pci" "ahci" "usbhid" "usb_storage" "sd_mod" ];
# Tell NixOps how to find the machine
deployment.targetEnv = "none";
deployment.targetHost = host;
deployment.targetPort = port;
networking.privateIPv4 = host;
};
in
{
# Tell NixOps about the hosts it should manage
athens = machine {
host = "192.168.0.2";
name = "athens";
hostNic = "enp30s0";
guests = {
some-athens-guest = {
memory = "4"; # GB
diskSize = "50"; # GB
mac = "D2:91:69:C0:14:9A";
ip = "192.168.0.101"; # Ignored, only for personal reference
};
};
rome = machine {
host = "192.168.0.3";
name = "rome";
hostNic = "enp3s0";
};
}
We'll also declare a common baseline that we'd like to share with all VMs as well. This mostly boils down to making sure that we always have SSH access to the machines. Let's call this file baseline.nix:
{
# Make sure that we still have admin access to the machine
services.openssh.enable = true;
networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 22 ];
users = {
mutableUsers = false;
users.root.openssh.authorizedKeys.keyFiles = [ ./teozkr_id_rsa.pub ];
};
}
Then tell NixOps about the new network, and make sure that it deploys correctly:
$ NIXOPS_DEPLOYMENT=vm-test-hosts nixops create network-hosts.nix
$ NIXOPS_DEPLOYMENT=vm-test-hosts nixops deploy
Picking a Hypervisor
NixOS supports three different hypervisors out of the box: VirtualBox, Xen, and libvirt (backed by QEMU/KVM). I chose libvirt, because KVM is an upstream kernel project where VirtualBox requires custom kernel modules and NixOS doesn't currently support running Xen when booting in UEFI mode.
Also, as far as I can tell, libvirt's virt-manager is the only relevant graphical management utility that supports remote management out of the box. This is pretty much a hard requirement, since I'm also running a few non-NixOS VMs on the server.
Installing the Hypervisor
Thankfully, NixOS makes this step very simple: simply enable the relevant NixOS module and activate your new configuration.
In our case, we want to enable the libvirtd service, as well as the relevant KVM kernel module. This means adding two new attrs to machine:
boot.kernelModules = [ "kvm-amd" "kvm-intel" ];
virtualisation.libvirtd.enable = true;
You can skip enabling kvm-amd if you're running a pure Intel cluster, and vice versa. But keeping both enabled won't hurt either.
Afterwards, deploy again and check that everything still works.
Setting Up the Guests
Surely NixOps Will Handle This?
NixOps actually has a libvirt back-end. However, it turns out that this only works for deploying to a local libvirtd install, so we'll have to do things manually.
Surely NixOS Will Handle This?
NixOS only has modules for managing the hypervisors, not for managing their guests declaratively. We'll have to set this up ourselves.
Okay, Okay, I'll Do It Myself
I chose to make a systemd unit per guest, which automatically configures and starts the VM. This means that NixOS will automatically restart the VM when the configuration changes.
To do this, we map over the guests argument that we previously ignored to create the services:
systemd.services = lib.mapAttrs' (name: guest: lib.nameValuePair "libvirtd-guest-${name}" {
after = [ "libvirtd.service" ];
requires = [ "libvirtd.service" ];
wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
serviceConfig = {
Type = "oneshot";
RemainAfterExit = "yes";
};
script =
let
xml = pkgs.writeText "libvirt-guest-${name}.xml"
''
<domain type="kvm">
<name>${name}</name>
<uuid>UUID</uuid>
<os>
<type>hvm</type>
</os>
<memory unit="GiB">${guest.memory}</memory>
<devices>
<disk type="volume">
<source volume="guest-${name}"/>
<target dev="vda" bus="virtio"/>
</disk>
<graphics type="spice" autoport="yes"/>
<input type="keyboard" bus="usb"/>
<interface type="direct">
<source dev="${hostNic}" mode="bridge"/>
<mac address="${guest.mac}"/>
<model type="virtio"/>
</interface>
</devices>
<features>
<acpi/>
</features>
</domain>
'';
in
''
uuid="$(${pkgs.libvirt}/bin/virsh domuuid '${name}' || true)"
${pkgs.libvirt}/bin/virsh define <(sed "s/UUID/$uuid/" '${xml}')
${pkgs.libvirt}/bin/virsh start '${name}'
'';
preStop =
''
${pkgs.libvirt}/bin/virsh shutdown '${name}'
let "timeout = $(date +%s) + 10"
while [ "$(${pkgs.libvirt}/bin/virsh list --name | grep --count '^${name}$')" -gt 0 ]; do
if [ "$(date +%s)" -ge "$timeout" ]; then
# Meh, we warned it...
${pkgs.libvirt}/bin/virsh destroy '${name}'
else
# The machine is still running, let's give it some time to shut down
sleep 0.5
fi
done
'';
}) guests;
The UUID trickery is required because virsh define will overwrite based on the UUID, but we only care about the human-readable names. So we lock in on the first UUID and then reuse it each time we start the VM.
We could call it a day here, and just create the disks manually. But this is NixOS, dammit: this should be declarative! Which gets us to...
Building a NixOS base image
We'd like to have a common base image that VMs should be based on, which should contain just enough so that we can then deploy our actual setup using NixOps. Let's start with defining a baseline image baseline-qemu.nix for our guests, which sets up the appropriate kernel modules, and which has a common partition layout:
{
imports = [ ./baseline.nix ];
fileSystems."/".device = "/dev/disk/by-label/nixos";
boot.initrd.availableKernelModules = [ "xhci_pci" "ehci_pci" "ahci" "usbhid" "usb_storage" "sd_mod" "virtio_balloon" "virtio_blk" "virtio_pci" "virtio_ring" ];
boot.loader = {
grub = {
version = 2;
device = "/dev/vda";
};
timeout = 0;
};
}
Then we can build an image, let's call it image.nix. We need to build our image in a VM since Nix builders don't usually have root access, but thankfully Nixpkgs has a convenient utility for that. This bit is very much inspired by NixOps' libvirt image.
{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {}, system ? builtins.currentSystem, ... }:
let
config = (import <nixpkgs/nixos/lib/eval-config.nix> {
inherit system;
modules = [ {
imports = [ ./baseline-qemu.nix ];
# We want our template image to be as small as possible, but the deployed image should be able to be
# of any size. Hence we resize on the first boot.
systemd.services.resize-main-fs = {
wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
serviceConfig.Type = "oneshot";
script =
''
# Resize main partition to fill whole disk
echo ", +" | ${pkgs.utillinux}/bin/sfdisk /dev/vda --no-reread -N 1
${pkgs.parted}/bin/partprobe
# Resize filesystem
${pkgs.e2fsprogs}/bin/resize2fs /dev/vda1
'';
};
} ];
}).config;
in pkgs.vmTools.runInLinuxVM (
pkgs.runCommand "nixos-sun-baseline-image"
{
memSize = 768;
preVM =
''
mkdir $out
diskImage=image.qcow2
${pkgs.vmTools.qemu}/bin/qemu-img create -f qcow2 $diskImage 1G
mv closure xchg/
'';
postVM =
''
echo compressing VM image...
${pkgs.vmTools.qemu}/bin/qemu-img convert -c $diskImage -O qcow2 $out/baseline.qcow2
'';
buildInputs = [ pkgs.utillinux pkgs.perl pkgs.parted pkgs.e2fsprogs ];
exportReferencesGraph =
[ "closure" config.system.build.toplevel ];
}
''
# Create the partition
parted /dev/vda mklabel msdos
parted /dev/vda -- mkpart primary ext4 1M -1s
. /sys/class/block/vda1/uevent
mknod /dev/vda1 b $MAJOR $MINOR
# Format the partition
mkfs.ext4 -L nixos /dev/vda1
mkdir /mnt
mount /dev/vda1 /mnt
for dir in dev proc sys; do
mkdir /mnt/$dir
mount --bind /$dir /mnt/$dir
done
storePaths=$(perl ${pkgs.pathsFromGraph} /tmp/xchg/closure)
echo filling Nix store...
mkdir -p /mnt/nix/store
set -f
cp -prd $storePaths /mnt/nix/store
# The permissions will be set up incorrectly if the host machine is not running NixOS
chown -R 0:30000 /mnt/nix/store
mkdir -p /mnt/etc/nix
echo 'build-users-group = ' > /mnt/etc/nix/nix.conf
# Register the paths in the Nix database.
printRegistration=1 perl ${pkgs.pathsFromGraph} /tmp/xchg/closure | \
chroot /mnt ${config.nix.package.out}/bin/nix-store --load-db
# Create the system profile to allow nixos-rebuild to work.
chroot /mnt ${config.nix.package.out}/bin/nix-env \
-p /nix/var/nix/profiles/system --set ${config.system.build.toplevel}
# `nixos-rebuild' requires an /etc/NIXOS.
mkdir -p /mnt/etc/nixos
touch /mnt/etc/NIXOS
# `switch-to-configuration' requires a /bin/sh
mkdir -p /mnt/bin
ln -s ${config.system.build.binsh}/bin/sh /mnt/bin/sh
# Generate the GRUB menu.
chroot /mnt ${config.system.build.toplevel}/bin/switch-to-configuration boot
umount /mnt/{proc,dev,sys}
umount /mnt
''
)
Then we want to use this image whenever a disk does not exist, so we need to send it to each host. We can do this by adding the following attr to machine:
environment.etc."virt/base-images/baseline.qcow2".source = "${import ./image.nix args}/baseline.qcow2";
Then we want to make the VM services create the disk images, by prepending the following to the unit script attribute:
if ! ${pkgs.libvirt}/bin/virsh vol-key 'guest-${name}' --pool guests &> /dev/null; then
${pkgs.libvirt}/bin/virsh vol-create-as guests 'guest-${name}' '${guest.diskSize}GiB'
${pkgs.qemu}/bin/qemu-img convert /etc/virt/base-images/baseline.qcow2 '/dev/${hostName}/guest-${name}'
fi
Now try deploying it again, and the VMs should be up and running, congratulations! You can confirm this by connecting with either virt-manager or virsh.
Why did we add a symlink to the base image, rather than use it directly in the service? Because this means that modifying the base image won't cause NixOS to restart the services. That would have been pointless since the base image is only used on the first boot anyway. Afterwards updates will be handled by regular NixOps deployments to the guests.
Deploying the guests
Now you can finally define a physical network for our guests! You'll want to use the ~"none"~ targetEnv again, since you already manage it declaratively. Also, you'll want to import the baseline-qemu.nix file for each VM, to teach it about the file system layout layout, and to make sure that all the relevant drivers are loaded.
Have fun! :D
Drawbacks
Of course, this approach has a few drawbacks too. If any of these are a dealbreaker for you then it's probably not a good fit for you.
- Every rebuild of the template image will cause a ~1GB file to be transmitted to each host. This could be a problem if you're using a metered internet connection, or if you're on a low-bandwidth connection.
- Removed VMs are shut down, but not removed automatically. I personally like this since I don't want content to delete itself silently, but it could be a problem if you have a large number of stateless VMs.
- Each VM has its own disk image. In theory multiple identical stateless VMs could run from the same read-only disk, but that would take some refactoring.
- systemd can't tell if an outside source has shut down the VM, so it can get confused if a VM shuts itself down, or if you do it yourself from virsh/virt-manager.