virt-lab-creator

Build a home lab by using Terraform's dmacvicar/libvirt provider to create multiple VMs of a chosen Linux OS all at once.

About

This repository helps to quickly create and destroy a home lab of virtual machines that may be used to study, play, and testing purposes.

Let's say you need to create 4 RHEL VMs to practice for the RHCSA exam, or you need to create 3 Rocky Linux VMs to learn Ansible and test playbooks, create it with terraform apply and quickly destroy all resources when finished terraform destroy.

For each home lab created:

• A default network interface is created and started in each VM.

• A default admin user with sudo privileges is created in each VM.

• The Pool, Volumes, and cloud-init disks created will be stored in the /home/<user>/libvirt_storage/ directory.

Requirements

• The hardware must support virtualization and must have enough memory, cpu, and storage to hold desired VMs pretended.

• A Linux OS with Virtual Machine Manager and Terraform installed.

• A generic cloud qcow2 image of the desired OS for the VM. This repository was tested and proven to work with the following images:

  • Rocky-8-GenericCloud.latest.x86_64.qcow2 - Rocky Linux 8 "Geneneric Cloud / Open Stack"
  • Fedora-Cloud-Base-36-1.5.x86_64.qcow2 - Fedora 36 Cloud Base images "Cloud Base qcow2 image"
  • rhel-8.6-x86_64-kvm.qcow2 - Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 KVM Guest Image" (login with free subscription)

  Look for an image named "Cloud Based", "Generic Cloud / Open Stack", "KVM Guest Image", or something similar on the chosen OS's downloads page.

How To Use

1. Clone or download this repository.

2. Create a directory named images/ inside the repository directory, download the chosen Linux OS image, and save it inside the images/ directory.

3. Edit the variables.tf file providing the specifications desired for your home lab.

4. Set up the home lab as you wish. Inside the repository directory, run:

   • terraform init - to initiate and download required providers.

   • terraform validate - to double check for any unintentional edit.

   • terraform plan - to inspect what will be created.

5. Run terraform apply -auto-approve to create the home lab.

6. Open Virtual Machine Manager, manually start any newly created VM, and log in with the default credentials:

   user: admin / password: adminpwd

7. Destroy the lab with: terraform destroy -auto-approve

To create a second home lab just download or clone the repository again into another directory, and repeat the steps above.