Spin up a virtual machine instance in a few seconds with cloud image and cloud-init is a familiar practice on cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure. Cloud image and cloud-init are not just for cloud providers, it can be deployed in KVM to spin up a virtual machine instantly without guest os installation.

The goal is to create a VM instance in KVM with cloud image and cloud-init.

Prerequisites

Installed KVM and libvirt

Getting started

• Cloud-Init configuration

  nano user-data.yml

• Network configuration

  nano network-config.yml

• Spin up Ubuntu 20.04 VM

  Usage: ./build.sh VMname OSname DiskSize VNCPort

  ./build.sh ubuntu-instance ubuntu 20 5902

  • Spin up Debian 10 VM

  Usage: ./build.sh VMname OSname DiskSize VNCPort

  ./build.sh debian-instance debian 20 5903

Resource

• An Introduction to Cloud-Config Scripting
• Cloud-init Documentation
• Ubuntu Cloud Images