Prepare your local network environment

We are going to create a dedicated virtual network on your machine which will be used to allocate addresses to any MicroVMs we create.

The benefit of using a dedicated network and a bridge is that we won't accidentally interfere or conflict with anything else running on your machine. We will have a segregated dhcp pool which will make it easy to track address leases in the case of a problem.

We will also create a bridge and associated tap device. This will allow us to create and then connect to flintlock-created MicroVMs on the same host in tap mode (the default macvtap mode would not be useable in a single-machine setup).

Install

We'll use libvirt and the virsh CLI tool to create and manage the virtual network.

First install required packages:

sudo apt install qemu qemu-kvm libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system virtinst bridge-utils

Then start libvirtd:

sudo systemctl enable libvirtd
sudo systemctl start libvirtd

Check that the service is running:

systemctl status libvirtd.service

Output

Create the network and bridge

Define the bridge name:

export BRIDGE_NAME=lmbr0

Define the network in an XML file:

cat << EOF >>~/liquid-metal-net.xml
<network>
  <name>liquid-metal</name>
  <forward mode='nat'>
    <nat>
      <port start='1024' end='65535'/>
    </nat>
  </forward>
  <bridge name="$BRIDGE_NAME" stp='on' delay='0'/>
  <ip address='192.168.100.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
    <dhcp>
      <range start='192.168.100.10' end='192.168.100.254'/>
    </dhcp>
  </ip>
</network>
EOF

tip

Change the 192.168.100.x addresses if you are already using that range on your network.

Define and start the network:

sudo virsh net-define liquid-metal-net.xml
sudo virsh net-start liquid-metal

Output

Verify that it was created and is up:

virsh net-list

Output:

 Name           State    Autostart   Persistent
-------------------------------------------------
 default        active   yes         yes
 liquid-metal   active   no          yes

Create the tap device and attach it to the network bridge

Export the device name:

export TAP_NAME=tap0

Create the tap device and connect it to the bridge:

sudo ip tuntap add $TAP_NAME mode tap
sudo ip link set $TAP_NAME master $BRIDGE_NAME up

Verify the devices with ip link show $TAP_NAME and ip link show $BRIDGE_NAME.

We can now move on to installing containerd.

Prepare your local network environment

Install​

Create the network and bridge​

Create the tap device and attach it to the network bridge​

Install

Create the network and bridge

Create the tap device and attach it to the network bridge