Hello World,

While waiting for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release, we are continuing our journey in the virtualization world in Linux.  The most widely used option for virtualization in Linux world is the KVM virtualization technology.  When enabling KVM virtualization on a Linux box, the most common used management interface tool will be the Virt-Manager because it’s offer quite a lot of configuration options and because it’s available to most of the Linux Distributions.  However, Other options exists 

Our previous post was focusing on Gnome Boxes, an easy to use virtualization solution mainly used on top of Linux Desktop Operating system. Gnome Boxes depends on kvm technology but offer a really simplified management interface that most of the average users will be able to work with. Gnome Boxes could be a good alternative to virtualbox software or VMWare Player on Linux Desktop environment.   Choice is up to you (as also with Linux) 

Today, we will briefly explain how to install and configure the Kimchi Project 3.0.0 on Ubuntu 19.10 Operating System.  Kimchi is providing an HTML5 web interface that will help you managing your virtual machine infrastructure through a web browser.   Again, Kimchi might not offer all the options available in Virt-Manager but can meet requirements of certain scenario.  Th Web interface can be access from anywhere and it’s quite easy to use.  

So, let’s have a quick look at how to enable this web management interface….  

Step by Step instructions 

Kimchi Release 3.0.0

In Januray 2020, the Kimchi project team has released the latest version of Kimchi which is set to 3.0.0.  This release is an important one as the software has been re-written to support python 3.  Previous version of Kimchi (2.5.0) could be installed on Ubuntu 16.04 and later but because of some dependencies discrepancies, there was a need to manually update some configuration files.  This is something of the past.  The new release is really easy to install on Ubuntu 19.10 as you will see 

Install dependencies 

As a first step, you would ensure that your Ubuntu Operating system is up to date.  When this is ok, we can start installing the Kimchi dependencies (including kvm  🙂 ).

From a Terminal console, type the following command

sudo apt install -y python3-configobj python3-lxml python3-magic python3-paramiko python3-ldap spice-html5 novnc qemu-kvm python3-libvirt python3-parted python3-guestfs python3-pil python3-cherrypy3 libvirt0 libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-clients nfs-common sosreport open-iscsi libguestfs-tools libnl-route-3-dev

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Let’s  check that kvm is installed and that your system support virtualization technology by issuing the following command in the terminal console 

kvm-ok

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As you need a web server to host a web management interface, we will install the nginx webserver by issuing the following command 

sudo apt install nginx -y

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Install wok components 

At this stage, we have the basic infrastructure ready and we can start focusing on the Kimchi installation software.  First, we will need to download the wok components as Kimchi is built on top of it. Then, we can perform the installation.  Perform the following actions from a terminal console 

wget https://github.com/kimchi-project/wok/releases/download/3.0.0/wok-3.0.0-0.ubuntu.noarch.deb

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Once the package downloaded, go to the directory where the package is located and execute the following command

sudo apt install -y ./wok-3.0.0-0.ubuntu.noarch.deb

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On the release page, there is a mention that some Kimchi dependencies need to be installed via pip.  We are not sure if this is indeed needed but we will execute these commands in order to ensure that we meet all the requirements  

sudo apt install -y python3-pip pkg-config libnl-route-3-dev

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Then, you will need to install some additional requirements (contained in the txt file).  Issuing this command will install these requirements (ethtool and ipaddr)

sudo -H pip3 install -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/master/requirements-UBUNTU.txt

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Install Kimchi

Finally, we are ready to download Kimchi package and perform the installation.  Again, we will do everything from the command line as this is quite straight forward. So, issue the following commands in the Terminal Console

wget https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/releases/download/3.0.0/kimchi-3.0.0-0.noarch.deb

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When package is downloaded, we can start the installation process 

sudo apt install -y ./kimchi-3.0.0-0.noarch.deb

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Install Virt-Manager (Optional)

It’s recommended to install Virt-Manager as this management interface offer a wide range of configuration options that Kimchi might not offer. Kimchi seems to be a really good web interface management for KVM Virtual machines but we have noticed  indeed that not all the configuration options are exposed.  So, it might be useful to have virt-manager installed beforehand so we can adopt more quickly if there is a need. 

sudo apt-get install virt-manager

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Validating your installation

To validate your installation, you simply needs to open your browser and try to access the following url

 https://localhost:8001

Note : Some times, the page is redirected from https://localhost:8010 instead of https://localhost:8001 which result in a failed login page….So, ensure that the port 8001 is indeed selected….

If everything went fine with the installation, you should see the following login page but we are not yet there.  To login, you simply needs to use your user name and password because Kimchi is using PAM module for authentication process

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After your login, if you see something like this, where a virtualization tab is visible and accessible, you have successfully performed your installation of Kimchi.  Under the virtualization tab, you can see that you have everything you need to create virtual machines, manage storage and networking settings from your web interface….

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If you see a page like the one below where there is no Virtualization tab, this means we have a problem… We had the issue and this was most of the time related to the fact that the BIOS/UEFI Virtualization feature where not enabled. 

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Note : 

if you still have the missing virtualization tab, you should try to execute the following steps in order to find some hints (see here for detailed info : https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi) You can get more details about it when running wok with --environment=dev

sudo systemctl stop wokd
sudo python3 /usr/bin/wokd --environment=dev

These commands should provide you more information about what’s really missing and you can try to adjust and fix your installation

 

Final Notes

Since the release of Kimchi 3.0.0, the installation process is really straight forward and easy to perform.  With the previous version, installation was not complex but there was a need to modify config file manually and tweak a little bit your system to have it running properly.   This post is obviously only the begin of our journey.  We have simply described how to perform the installation but we didn’t create yet any virtual machines and we didn’t test all the possible configurations possibilities and limitations offered by the tool….

This might be the topic of a coming post

Till next time 

See ya

Detailed info about how to install Kimchi 3.0.0 can be found at : https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi