Category: Ubuntu

Running headless VirtualBox inside Nested KVM

For the Ceph training at 42on I use VirtualBox to build Virtual Machines. This is because they work under MacOS, Windows and Linux.

For the internal Git at 42on we use Gitlab and I wanted to use Gitlab’s CI to build my Virtual Machines automatically.

As we don’t have any physical hardware at 42on (everything runs in the cloud) I wanted to see if I could run VirtualBox Headless inside a VM with Nested KVM enabled.

Nested KVM

The first thing I checked was if my KVM Virtual Machine actually supported Nested KVM. This can be verified with the kvm-ok command under Ubuntu:

root@glrun01:~# kvm-ok 
INFO: /dev/kvm exists
KVM acceleration can be used
root@glrun01:~#

Now that’s verified I tried to install VirtualBox.

VirtualBox

Installing VirtualBox is straight forward. Just add the repository and install the packages. Don’t forget to reboot afterwards to make sure all kernel modules are loaded and properly installed.

apt-get install virtualbox

VirtualBox Extension Pack

The trick to get everything working properly is to install Oracle’s VirtualBox Extension Pack. It took me a while to figure out that I need to install it manually. It wasn’t done by default after install.

You need to download the pack and install it using the VBoxManage command.

wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.24/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.0.24.vbox-extpack
vboxmanage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.0.24.vbox-extpack
vboxmanage list extpacks
vboxmanage setproperty vrdeextpack "Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack"

With that installed and configured I rebooted the machine again just to be sure.

It works!

With that it actually worked. The VirtualBox VMs can now be built inside a Nested KVM machine controlled by Gitlab’s CI 🙂

VirtualBox images to experiment with IPv6

Around me I noticed that a lot of people don’t have hands-on experience with IPv6. The networks they work in do not support IPv6 nor does their ISP provide them with native IPv6 connectivity at home.

On my local systems I often use Virtual Box to set up (IPv6) testing environments. I thought I’d create some Virtual Machine images to get some hands-on experience with IPv6.

The images and README can be found on Github and are aimed to be easy to install and work with.

Requirements

To run the images you need to have Virtual Box installed. You also should be able to use the Linux command line as the Virtual Machines are based on Ubuntu 16.04.

More information can be found in the repository on Github in the README file.

Download

You can download the images here.

How to use

Please take a look at the README on Github. It tells you how to use them.

Happy testing!

Hitch TLS Proxy performance with 15k certificates

While testing with the Hitch TLS proxy in front of Varnish I stumbled upon a slow startup with a large amount of certificates.

In this case we (at PCextreme) want to run Hitch with around 50.000 certificates configured.

The webpage of Hitch says:

Safe for large installations: performant up to 15 000 listening sockets and 500 000 certificates.

10 minutes

I started testing on my local desktop with 15.000 certificates. My desktop is a Intel NUC with Ubuntu 14.04.

wido@wido-desktop:~/repos/hitch/src$ time sudo ./hitch -n 4 -u nobody -g nogroup --config=/opt/hitch/hitch.conf

real    9m40.088s
user    9m38.482s
sys 0m0.829s
wido@wido-desktop:~/repos/hitch/src$

A 10 minute startup time for Hitch is rather long. We started searching for the root-cause.

OpenSSL

After some searching we discovered the OpenSSL version in Ubuntu 14.04 was the problem. Testing with Ubuntu 15.10 showed us different results.

root@VM-9d8e8cfd-e30f-4c40-8c4e-2e098b0f11a5:~# time hitch --daemon --pidfile=/run/hitch.pid --user hitch --group hitch --config=/etc/hitch/hitch.conf

real    0m18.673s
user    0m6.780s
sys    0m2.000s

18 seconds is a lot better than 10 minutes!

Ubuntu 14.04 comes with OpenSSL 1.0.1f and Ubuntu 15.10 with 1.0.2d and that is where the difference seems to be.

100.000 certificates

After this we started testing with 100k certificates. It took 48 seconds to start with that amount of certificates configured.

For production we will use Ubuntu 16.04 which has similar results as Ubuntu 15.10.

So if you find Hitch slow when starting, check your OpenSSL version.