KVM Service Container on CRS 1000v?

[bobsmith5]

Having trouble trying to install a KVM service container on a CSR 1000v. First, KVM machine types seem to be disabled:

Router#show virtual-service

Virtual Service Global State and Virtualization Limits:

...

Machine types supported   : LXC

Machine types disabled    : KVM

And when I try to activate a KVM OVA that I installed it logs this message:

%VMAN-3-GENERAL_FAILURE: F0: vman:  Virtual Service[SCDemoVM]::Activate::Internal error::Machine type 'kvm' is not supported

Router version is 16.03.01 (Denali).

[bolick · Accepted solution]

Make sure that you have nested virtualization enabled in your hypervisor. VMWare calls this VHV or Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization and your CPU also has to support it. Other hypervisors call it different things. You also need to make sure that you have support for unsigned 3rd party KVM applications configured on the CSR. That would be the signing-level command under virtual-service. Finally, this is only available in IOS-XE 3.17 or later.

While support for KVM inside of the CSR is supported, it isn't always a good idea for actual deployment. You're running a virtual machine inside of a virtual machine so performance is going to suffer. However, it does make a great development sandbox for getting things working. You can find more info in DevNet at https://developer.cisco.com/site/kvm

Matt

[bobsmith5]

That was the issue; I needed to enable nested virtualization. Thanks. And yes this is just for development / testing purposes, not for production.

[bolick]

Please reach out to us (or just me) to let me know how it goes. We're very interested to hear what people are doing with KVM on our routers, what capabilities we need to add and what we can do to improve the documentation.

Matt

[prdonahue]

Can this be enabled on an EC2 instance? i.e., can one run KVM apps on a csr1000v running on AWS?