Have you ever wished you could easily spin up a virtual machine for a little testing? Something quick, but something you could (optionally) throw away when you were done?

Of course you have. And I think snap-guest is the answer to your dreams (mine, too!). It allows you to set up a “base” image, and then easily spin up copy-on-write copies of it.

Installation

You can follow the installation instructions in the README, though note the trap — the syntax for the symlink is backwards. With that setup, I built a handful of virtual machines. One is RHEL 6.3, and the other is Fedora 17. (I plan to set up more soon.) You may want to copy it into /usr/bin instead of symlinking it into /usr/local/bin if you use sudo.

The “base” VMs are something you should set up and then shut down, to never touch again, because otherwise you will cause problems with the “copy-on-write” copies which are now against something that has been changed underneath them. So create a base image that things will be based on. Here’s what I did after the base install:

• yum update
• yum install ntpd, set it up with working servers, and chkconfig ntpd on
• Set up EPEL
• yum install bash-completion git screen telnet (telnet is for checking ports, not insecure logins!)
• Add a non-privileged user
• I added repos for Aeolus, but did not install anything from them for the base image.
• Disable smartd, enable acpid
• Allow incoming traffic on ports 22, 80, 443, 3000 in the firewall
• Set up Avahi — yum install avahi, chkconfig avahi-daemon on, and open UDP port 5353 in the firewall. Do the same on your desktop, edit /etc/nsswitch.conf‘s “hosts:” line to read “hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns myhostname”. Now, ssh vm-hostname.local will “just work”. (Thanks, eck, for this trick!)
• Clean things out for provisioning of guests: touch /.unconfigure; yum clean all; rm -rf /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*; poweroff
• In hindsight, it might have been worthwhile to set up a basic local LDAP server on the guest so that I could test Conductor against it when needed.

When the machine shuts down, you shouldn’t boot it again, unless you are prepared to wipe out any derivative guests.

Usage

I ended up using a little more than is ordinarily required, because I didn’t love all of the defaults:

sudo /usr/local/bin/snap-guest -b Fedora-17-base -t test_f17_guest -m 2048 -c4 -n bridge=br0

This will clone the “Fedora-17-base” image, starting a “test_f17_guest” VM. -m 2048 tells it to use 2048MB RAM instead of 800MB. -c4 gives it 4 cores, and -n bridge=br0 brings it up using my host’s virbr0 brdiged interface for networking. Obviously, customize all of this as required.

Note that the system will come up with a hostname matching whatever you used with -t. If you set up Avahi as I outlined above, you should be able to “ssh test_f17_guest.local” and log right in.

I still have some kinks to work out, like network interfaces coming up under different names. But I think this is going to be immensely useful going forward. Historically, needing to test a patch on RHEL, or finding a clean Fedora system to test an upstream patch on to rule out issues with my local setup, has been a real timesink. Now it takes about 10 seconds to make a cloned guest, and under a minute for it to boot. I can re-use guests, or just trash them when I’m done.