Enabling nested virtualization in VMWare

juju
1

Hello community,

I’m writing a new charm to deploy our application. Our provider Vcenter, and our application needs to run in KVM under the ESXi VM - So, I need to enable nested virtualization on the machines that juju spawns.

I can’t find how to instruct juju to enable that setting on the created VMs. Is somebody aware of how to do so?

Thanks!

1 Like
2

Welcome @fsedano, thanks for your question.

I don’t believe so at this stage. It should be possible to enable nested virtualization via the vSphere Web Client, however. @babbageclunk could you please correct me?

It’s possible that enabling nested virtualization for specific instances would enable KVM instance creation for Juju to work via its standard syntax:

juju add-machine kvm:2 # assuming machine 2 supports nested virtualization

@fsedano it might be worthwhile testing the following steps and seeing how far you get:

  1. bootstrap to vSphere (this has presumably already been done)
  2. create a Juju model (juju add-model)
  3. use Juju to create a standard instance (juju add-machine --constraints "mem=8G")
  4. use the vSphere web client to enable nested virtualization
  5. use Juju to create containers within the standard instance created earlier (juju add-machine kvm:0)
3

Sorry @fsedano, as far as I know @timClicks is right - at the moment there’s no way to configure the VM to enable nested virtualisation from Juju. Once it’s enabled though, deploying to KVMs inside machines should work.

4

Why not deploy to lxc instead of nested KVM

1 Like
5

Thanks folks. I’m pretty sure that would work, but it would defeat one of the main advantages of using juju for me - Automatic machine creation.

A sightly different idea (but still a hack) would be to enable nested virtualization on the template. Still, fragile if for any reason template is updated :frowning:

6

Hey,

My application requires a full VM, not a container, so I don’t think that would work.

7

Juju would still be able to create KVM-based VMs. Enabling nested virtualisation would be a one off per host.

8

Hey tim. Thanks for replying.

Nested virtualization AFAIK is a per-vm setting, no per-host:

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