Instant Ubuntu VMs
A mini-cloud on your Mac or Windows workstation.
Multipass provides a command line interface to launch, manage and generally fiddle about with instances of Linux. The downloading of a minty-fresh image takes a matter of seconds, and within minutes a VM can be up and running.
The Register
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Ubuntu LTS on tap
Launch instances of Ubuntu and initialize them with cloud-init metadata just like AWS, Azure, Google, IBM and Oracle clouds.
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Up to date
Automatically fetch and maintain the freshest Ubuntu image from Canonical. Never waste time on updates at launch.
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Pet, and cattle
Your ‘primary’ instance gets special treatment with integration to your native filesystem and dedicated hot-key access.
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Native hypervisor
Hyper-V, HyperKit, Virtualbox and KVM are all natively used for the fastest startup time.
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Optimised guests
Custom tuned Ubuntu kernel is used for each hypervisor for the best I/O and performance.
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Platform integration
Share files and folders between your normal home directory and your instances.
Install Multipass
Download Multipass for Windows
Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise v 1803 or later
or Windows 10 Home/Pro/Enterprise with Virtualbox
Linux distributions with snap packages support enabled. Get your Linux set up for snaps
Getting started
Your first five minutes with Multipass should give you a sense of how much fun it is to have a lightweight cloud handy, free of charge, on your workstation. Let’s launch a few LTS instances, list them, exec a command or script inside the instance, use cloud-init and clean up old instances.
Launch an instance (by default you get the current Ubuntu LTS)
Run commands in that instance, try running bash (logout or ctrl-d to quit)
Pass a cloud-init metadata file to an instance on launch see using cloud-init with multipass for more details
See your instances
Stop and start instances
Clean up what you don’t need
Find alternate images to launch with multipass
Get help
Now don’t forget you still have ‘ubuntu-lts’ running :)