Any staff member can easly get a virtual host upon request. Students in need for a VM may talk to their supervisors.
As a staff member you will become the formal supervisor of the host. Of course you can assign additional superuser access to your students. But you remain responsible for that host.
The virtualization is based on x86_64 KVM. Typical VMs get ~1024MB RAM, 30GB HDD or NFS, 1-2 vCPUs, a virtual network interface bridged to the VLAN ibr-misc, and a password protected VNC console at vnc://<hostname>.mgmt.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de:5900. Some other configuration details are possible upon request.
Most VMs are setup with a small Ubuntu LTS system (20.04 as of March 2021) with a configuration that uses the IBR LDAP and NFS infrastructure, so that all IBR users can easily login. Other systems are hardly tested.
If you want to request a VM, please send an email to admin@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de. We need the following information:
As with baremetal hosts: Never use a static IP configuration on your host! Always use DHCPv4 and/or IPv6 SLAAC.
Some information about the new VM will be sent to you by email. The VM will have a usual LDAP host record with three additional attributes:
ibrLibvirtDomainXml: the KVM domain snippet, read-only, please request changes through email to admin@ibr.cs.tu-bs.deibrLibvirtHypervisor: the KVM hypervisor host, read-only, selected by the IBR adminsibrLibvirtAutostart: controls whether the VM should be started upon hypervisor startupHint: If you want to connect to your VM's VNC console at vnc://<hostname>.mgmt.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de:5900, read the password from the <graphics> section of ibrLibvirtDomainXml using the dirac tool:
$ dirac "host myhost ; show ibrLibvirtDomainXml" | grep graphics
<graphics type='vnc' port='5937' autoport='no' listen='0.0.0.0' passwd='PASSWORD'>
</graphics>
You can start, shutdown, reset, reboot your VMs through the ibr-vm-control command.
Note that all VMs' storage (NFS or local devices) is part of our backup strategy based of ZFS.