Part 0: Host setup

Dependencies

These are the list of packages that are necessary in an Arch Linux setup. Other distributions may package these with a different name.

• python3: Ansible and optionally testinfra
• kubectl helm helm-diff: Interacting with the cluster
• libvirt qemu: Running the virtual servers
• packer: Creating the base image with kubernetes
• terraform: Automating deployments
• mkisofs: Needed for creating an image for cloud-init, details and alternative tools are available at here, look for the CD configuration section.
• vagrant: Optional dependency for developing ansible roles.

Configuration

User Access

You might want to use your default user for accessing libvirt, you should add your user to the libvirt group. Create the group if it does not exist. You might also need to set LIBVIRT_DEFAULT_URI="qemu:///system" in your environment variables.

Domain Setup

To reach the VMs with their hostnames, you need to add libvirt_guest to /etc/nsswitch.conf, an example configuration file is as follows

hosts: libvirt_guest files myhostname dns

see Arch Wiki and Libvirt Documentation

Volume Pool

The default volume pool adds VMs and images to /var/lib/libvirt/images, If you do not have this pool you should create it by adding the following to a file, For this example I will add them to default.xml.

<pool type="dir">
  <name>default</name>
  <target>
    <path>/var/lib/libvirt/images</path>
  </target>
</pool>

Then create the pool

virsh pool-define default.xml
virsh pool-autostart default
virsh pool-start default

For different kinds of pools consult to Libvirt Documentation