Tutorial: Getting Started with Firecracker on VMware Fusion

This is the second part of the Firecracker article published last week. Having covered the basic architecture, I will walk you through the steps involved in setting up and configuring Firecracker on your local development machine.

The simplest way to explore Firecracker is to install it in an Ubuntu VM running on top of VMware Fusion. The first step is to configure VMware Fusion for Nested Virtualization.

Setting up an Ubuntu 16.04 VM with Nested Virtualization

Download and install VMware Fusion for Mac or Windows trial from VMware website. If you need a pre-configured Ubuntu 16.04 image, grab the VMDKfrom OSBoxes.org.

After installing Fusion, import the VMDK and create a new VM but don’t launch it yet. Access the settings to enable Intel-VTx support available under Processors and Memory configuration.

Since Firecracker needs KVM, we need to emulate hypervisor for the VM. The above configuration enables nested virtualization to run KVM on top of Fusion.

Start the Ubuntu VM and login with the username and password – osboxes andosboxes.org. Install VMware Tools, and optionally OpenSSH Server.

Install CPU Checker to ensure KVM is ready for use.

Read the entire article at The New Stack

Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter,  Facebook and LinkedIn.