Minikube in Hyper-V with nested virtualization

Hi guys, how are you?

I hope you are all doing fine!

Today, I’d like to give you a tutorial on Minikube.

minikube logo

I’ve been struggling with minikube inside a VM, because nested virtualization is not enabled by default.

I know I could have just used VMWare or XEN, but I wanted something simpler, and easier.

So I decided to go with Hyper-V on my physical host. But here’s where things got interesting. Nested virtualization is a bi***.

Setting up the Hypervisor

The first thing to do is to enable Hyper-V on your Windows machine.

In order to do this, open a Powershell as Administrator and run:

DISM /Online /Enable-Feature /All /FeatureName:Microsoft-Hyper-V

If you want to try another method, follow this link.

Setting up Vagrant

I’m using Vagrant, because things get a whole lot easier. If you have never used it, please, check out their website.

You can download it here.

After you have done this, select a directory to save a Vagrantfile.

A Vagrantfile is the main file to organize your vagrant machines, you don’t need to worry about images, vdi, snapshots or anything. Just code you machine. Seems cool!

In the selected directory, create a file called Vagrantfile, no extension:

Nice!

Running the VM

Now, just open a CMD as Administrator and run:

vagrant up --provider=hyperv

This will boot up the machine.

To SSH into it, just run:

vagrant ssh wbsv1

Nice! Now you are inside your VM on Hyper-V.

Making a nested virtualization Machine

That’s cool. But we cannot go into our machine and run a hypervisor. It’ll crash. We need to enable it first.

Well, I’ve researched a lot for this. The easier method that I’ve founded was this one:

Go into this link, or grab the following Powershell script:

Now, open a Powershell as Administrator, and run this script.

You may not be able to do this in the first time, because Powershell does not allow you to run “strange” scripts. To bypass this, run:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Bypass

Now, run the script:

\enable-nested.ps1 [YOUR VM NAME INSIDE HYPERV]

Don’t forget to change your VM name, which is showing on Hyper-V Manager.

Installing a bunch of necessary stuff

This is the boring part, we now have to install a lot of stuff. Some you may need, some of them are just for my confort. Choose whichever you like. I’ll tell you which one is a must.

First, SSH into your machine:

vagrant ssh wbsv1

wbsv1 is my hostname on Vagrantfile.

Now, you are inside the VM.

sudo su
yum update -y
yum install -y kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc make perl wget vim
wget https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc
wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/el/virtualbox.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/virtualbox.repo
yum install -y VirtualBox-6.0
/usr/lib/virtualbox/vboxdrv.sh setup
systemctl status vboxdrv
systemctl start vboxdrv
systemctl status vboxdrv

wget and vim are not a must. But I like them. Choose the editor you like. All the others packages are a must, sorry.

The first command is to update your yum repos. After that we need to install a bunch of stuff, if you want to know them a little better, you can check out this and this link.

You may have a problem with kernel version on Virtualbox. To solve this, you must install you kernel-devel version. Run the following to know which exactly version to install:

uname -r
yum install kernel-devel-[CURRENT_KERNEL]

Now, you might see something like this:

● vboxdrv.service - VirtualBox Linux kernel module
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/virtualbox/vboxdrv.sh; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (exited) since Wed 2019-04-03 16:18:58 UTC; 10min ago
Process: 63501 ExecStart=/usr/lib/virtualbox/vboxdrv.sh start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Apr 03 16:18:58 wbsv1 systemd[1]: Starting VirtualBox Linux kernel module...
Apr 03 16:18:58 wbsv1 vboxdrv.sh[63501]: vboxdrv.sh: Starting VirtualBox services.
Apr 03 16:18:58 wbsv1 systemd[1]: Started VirtualBox Linux kernel module.

Nice. Everything worked as planned.

Now, we need to setup our K8s environment.

Installing Docker

Docker is always useful. To install it:

This will download the latest CE version and enable it on reboot.

Installing Kubectl

Now, install the K8s cli:

This will add the kubernetes repo to your machine, and download it from yum.

Installing Minikube

Now, for the last part:

This will download the latest version of Minikube, today it’s on v1.0.

And it will add it to your path. Remember that the path on Centos is on /usr/bin/.

Now, just run your minikube cluster:

minikube start

It may take a while to download the images and get everything up and running. But it sure works.

If you had any doubts, contact me on my Linkedin.

This tutorial is also on my Gitlab, under the basics/Setup.md file.

Ok, till next time, guys. See ya!