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Imperative MicroVM management with the microvm command

Compartmentalizing services in an infrastructure landscape allows us to conduct maintenance individually and without affecting unrelated MicroVMs. The microvm command helps with that.

Create a MicroVM

You can specify this MicroVM's source flake with -f. If omitted, the tool will assume git+file:///etc/nixos. The source flakeref will be kept in /var/lib/microvms/*/flake for future updating the MicroVM.

microvm -f git+https://... -c my-microvm

Enabling MicroVM autostart

Extension of the host's systemd units must happen declaratively in the host's NixOS configuration:

microvm.autostart = [
  "myvm1"
  "myvm2"
  "myvm3"
];

Update a MicroVM

Updating does not refresh your packages but simply rebuilds the MicroVM. Use nix flake update to get new package versions.

microvm -u my-microvm

Until ways have been found to safely transfer the profile into the target /nix/store, and subsequently activate it, you must restart the MicroVM for the update to take effect.

Use the -R flag to automatically restart if an update was built.

List MicroVMs

Listing your MicroVMs is as trivial as ls -1 /var/lib/microvms

For more insight, the following command will read the current system version of all MicroVMs and compare them to what the corresponding flake evaluates. It is therefore quite slow to run, yet very useful for an updatable VM overview.

microvm -l

If you want a faster overview of booted and current versions, run this instead:

ls -l /var/lib/microvms/*/{current,booted}/share/microvm/system

Removing MicroVMs

First, stop the MicroVM:

systemctl stop microvm@$NAME

If you don't use absolute filesystem paths for sockets, volumes, or shares, all MicroVM state is kept under /var/lib/microvms/$NAME/. The microvm@.serivce systemd service template depends on existence of this directory.

rm -rf /var/lib/microvms/$NAME