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Cubbli and Virtual Machines

Last modified by Elmo Rohula on 2024/12/10 12:49

It is possible to run virtual machines (VM) inside Cubbli hosts, including virtual machines running Windows OS. However, please consider the following options first:

  • You can access and use Windows 7, Windows 10 and Cubbli Linux virtual hosts from University's virtual desktop (VDI) service. Please see Virtual desktops (VDI) and VMware for instructions.
  • You need a license to run Windows. University's Windows license might or might not allow this, depending on the situation. You should contact helpdesk before installing Windows yourself, unless you have a license of your own.
  • If you need a maintained virtual machine to run services of your own, you should ask helpdesk for a virtual machine hosted inside University's VM infrastructure instead of a local Cubbli host.

Virtual machines inside Cubbli hosts should be used for:

  • Development, where there is a need to create and delete and maintain multiple virtual machines (Cubbli development is done like this).
  • If you need to run operating system (OS) instances of your own, where the OS isn't maintained by University's IT department.
  • If you have a need for VM in a laptop, when network isn't available. 

Cubbli can also be run inside a virtual machine. It should work fine in all modern hypervisors, including VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM and Virtualbox.

We recommend you use KVM+Qemu hypervisor in Cubbli. These come packaged in the cubbli-kvm package. The package installation also configures virt-manager to use the home-partition for storage to avoid filling the computer's root-partition to prevent any issues it might cause. Virtual machines extensions (VT-x) should be enabled in BIOS and sudo rights are needed for installation. If you don't have access to BIOS and sudo access, you should contact helpdesk for instructions. Hypervisor installation can be done remotely by helpdesk, but BIOS changes need local access to machine.  

Using KVM+Qemu as hypervisor and virt-manager as GUI

  • KVM and Qemu and virt-manager can be installed via apt with sudo apt install cubbli-kvm. 
  • Your user also needs to be a part of the libvirt group. You can add yourself to it with sudo addgroup $USER libvirt.
  • The packages are automatically updated, including automated security updates
  • Virtual machines can easily be accessed from other Cubbli hosts over ssh
  • You can use virsh command line tool for virtual machine management
  • You don't need 3rd party kernel modules. Secure boot can be used on the host machine. 
  • All software is under OS license. 
  • Link to virt-manager home page, including screenshot