LXD on POWER Intro

LXD is now supported also on ppc64el architecture, and you can exploit all the POWER architecture with LXD.

Support

Ubuntu release as the 'hypervisor'

LXD packages is available only on Ubuntu 15.04 so far.

Ubuntu release as containers

As containers, you can install all Ubuntu releases available for ppc64el, i.e, all Ubuntu releases since 14.04 are available as images. The names for the images are:

Hypervisor mode

You are able to use LXD on all POWER running mode, as:

Image server

The current image server that contains ppc64el containers are:

images.linuxcontainers.org

Step by Step Tutorial

In order to be able to install and use LXD on ppc64el architecture, you need to have Ubuntu version 15.04 and install the lxd packages as:

$ sudo apt-get install lxd   # Install the lxd package
$ newgrp lxd
$ sudo systemctl start lxd  # start lxd daemon

Now you have LXD running on your environment, you can connect to a image server. The image server that contains the pcpc64el images are images.linuxcontainers.org. Let's create a image repository pointing to this directory and list the ppc64el images available:

$ lxc remote add imgsrv images.linuxcontainers.org
$ $ lxc image  list images: | grep /ppc64el  
| ubuntu/trusty/ppc64el (1 more) | 7008c3d1cf42 | yes    | Ubuntu trusty (ppc64el) | ppc64le | May 23, 2015 at 1:33am (BRT)  |
| ubuntu/utopic/ppc64el (1 more) | d5f1695dd47b | yes    | Ubuntu utopic (ppc64el) | ppc64le | May 23, 2015 at 1:44am (BRT)  |
| ubuntu/vivid/ppc64el (1 more)  | 3015a0ab9705 | yes    | Ubuntu vivid (ppc64el)  | ppc64le | May 23, 2015 at 1:56am (BRT)  |
| ubuntu/wily/ppc64el (1 more)   | 4863fba5527f | yes    | Ubuntu wily (ppc64el)   | ppc64le | May 23, 2015 at 2:07am (BRT)  |

You can instantiate any of those images as simple as:

$ lxc launch imgsrv:ubuntu/trusty/ppc64el 1404

As soon as you do that, you are going to have a container named 1404 running with ubuntu 14.04 release.

You can list the containers running using the lxc list command, as:

$ lxc list
+------+---------+------------+------+-----------+
| NAME |  STATE  |    IPV4    | IPV6 | EPHEMERAL |
+------+---------+------------+------+-----------+
| 1404 | RUNNING | 10.0.3.202 |      | NO        |
+------+---------+------------+------+-----------+

Here after, this 1404 is a traditional linux container.

Limitations

Live migration

Live migration is still not working on ppc64el because the criu package is not building on ppc64el architecture yet.

Upstream release

There is a recommendation to use the latest upstream version, as the lxd package available in wily, which should be installed without problem on vivid.