This page will outline a basic procedure for setting up either an Arch Linux or Ubuntu Linux VM on one of the ACM's VM host servers from a base disk image. These base VM images are pre-configured to authenticate users via ACM's Active Directory system in addition to basic initial configuration. The disk images used for these VM's have a default 10Gb size which should be more than sufficient for most usage or experimentation. A basic mailer is also configured so that machines may send emails from their internal hostname through acm.cs.uic.edu for the purpose of email based notifications.

Libvirt on the ACM VM hosts are configured to use polkit to control full access to the management framework. By default, members of the AcmLanAdmins Active Directory group are the only ones with admin access to libvirt. The polkit rules file that controls this is located at

/etc/polkit/rule.d/50-org.libvirt.unix.manage.rules

NOTE: sudo access is needed to view or modify this file. Normal users with SSH access to the VM hosts should be able to access libvirt in a read-only capacity to at least view the VM state and list on running VMs. The VM host may also have SSH access to them restricted to the AcmLanAdmins group via the PAM access module configured via

/etc/security/access.conf

You will need to pick a VM host for the new VM.

Currently the VM hosts are:

• kirk.acm.cs
• picard.acm.cs
• janeway.acm.cs
• sisko.acm.cs
• dsk7.acm.cs/deepspace-k7.acm.cs (should only be usedInitial Preparation if necessary as this is a NFS server)

One important thing to note is that the current VM hosts have 2 possible locations to keep the VMs disk image. The first is the default location located at

/var/lib/libvirt/images/

. This location is on the main OS drive of the machine and should be used sparingly as this drive is generally the smallest in the machine. The other location setup on the VM hosts is setup on their second, larger drive and on most VM hosts is located at /drive2/vm-images/.
The one exception to this is deepspace-k7.acm.cs whose secondary drive location is <code>/raid/vm-images/</code> due to this also being the location of its large RAID6 array and this should be the primary save location on that host.
The default disk image size for a VM is 10Gb in a COW2 format that automatically expands the real image size until that 10Gb limit is reached. One procedure for adding additional storage to a VM, if truly required, is outlined below.

minecraft.acm.cs's VM setup currently provides and example of this on kirk.acm.cs. You can view this via libvirt by opening the VM's description to see how it is configured.