For us engaged in the IT technology industry, everyone should be familiar with VMware virtual machines, usually build a learning, testing, development environment by yourself, and really can't do without it.
VMware virtual machines are very powerful, such as: fast start-up, easier and faster running programs; Virtual systems can only emulate the same environment as existing operating systems, while virtual machines can emulate other kinds of operating systems; And virtual machines need to emulate the underlying hardware instructions, so they run much slower than virtual systems.
VMware virtual machines are really good to use, but they are charged, and they are not cheap. So, today, I would like to introduce you to a user-friendly and lightweight virtual machine product Multipass (free and open source).
Introduction to Multipass
Multipass is a very lightweight virtual machine command management tool that supports multi-platform runtime environments such as Linux, Windows, and macO S.
Multipass is an open source project launched by Canonical, the Ubuntu operating company. On different operating systems, different virtualization technologies are used, and you can quickly create the virtual machines you need with minimal resource overhead.
For programmers using Linux systems, Multipass also provides a command-line interface to manage your Linux instance, which is very convenient, easy to operate and manage.
Multipass installation
On the official website: https://multipass.run/ Select the system version that should be downloaded on:
The version of Windows I chose here
After installation, check the version you installed
$ multipass version Multipass use
Create an Ubuntu virtual machine
Start by looking at the Ubuntu images you can download and use
$ multipass find
After successful operation, you can see the following list of these images, including various versions.
Image Aliases Version Description
snapcraft:core18 20201111 Snapcraft builder for Core 18
snapcraft:core20 20201111 Snapcraft builder for Core 20
core core16 20200818 Ubuntu Core 16
core18 20200812 Ubuntu Core 18
16.04 xenial 20210128 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
18.04 bionic 20210129 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
20.04 focal,lts 20210223 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
20.10 groovy 20210209 Ubuntu 20.10
appliance:adguard-home 20200812 Ubuntu AdGuard Home Appliance
appliance:mosquitto 20200812 Ubuntu Mosquitto Appliance
appliance:nextcloud 20200812 Ubuntu Nextcloud Appliance
appliance:openhab 20200812 Ubuntu openHAB Home Appliance
appliance:plexmediaserver 20200812 Ubuntu Plex Media Server Appliance
Create a new container
$ multipass launch --name dg
Launched: dg
Then download the latest version of the Ubuntu image, and then we can use it directly.
$ multipass exec dg -- lsb_release -d
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
Operate the virtual machine
View the list of virtual machines
After the virtual machine is created, view the list of virtual machines.
Name State IPv4 Image
dg Running 192.168.24.5 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
There is now a virtual machine running with Ubuntu version 18.04 with the corresponding IP address: 192.168.24.5.
View virtual machine information
Through the command, you can view the specific information of the currently running virtual machine.
$ multipass info --all
Name: dg
State: Running
IPv4: 192.168.24.5
Release: Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
Image hash: fe3030933742 (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS)
Load: 0.00 0.00 0.00
Disk usage: 1.5G out of 4.7G
Memory usage: 112.1M out of 985.7M
Enter the virtual machine
Use the following command to view the virtual machine's system configuration information, memory, disk usage, and so on.
$ multipass shell dg
If you don't want to go inside the system, you can also operate the Ubuntu system through the multipass exce command mentioned above.
Pause/restart the virtual machine
# 暂停
$ multipass stop dg
# 启动
$ multipass start dg
Delete/release the virtual machine
After you delete a virtual machine using the delete command, it actually exists, and you need to release the virtual machine to delete it completely.
# 删除
$ multipass delete dg
# 释放
$ multipass purge dg
Configure automation
It is necessary to keep the development environment and online environment consistent, while saving deployment time. We can initialize the container with --cloud-init:
$ multipass launch --name ubuntu --cloud-init config.yaml
config.yaml 是初始化配置文件，内容如下：
#cloud-config
runcmd:
- curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash -
- sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
- wget https://releases.leanapp.cn/leancloud/lean-cli/releases/download/v0.21.0/lean-cli-x64.deb
- sudo dpkg -i lean-cli-x64.deb
runcmd can specify commands that run when the container is first started.
summary
After using it for a while, I think this tool is really good! For example, I'm going to do some Linux experiments, and I can set up the system in a few minutes through Multipass to test it. To test a small DB cluster, you can also quickly set up a virtual machine cluster locally via Multipass, which is great!
The only fly in the ointment is that Multipass can only use Ubuntu images, because this tool is developed and open source by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu.