What is minimega?

minimega is a tool for launching and managing virtual machines. It can run on your laptop or distributed across a cluster. minimega is fast, easy to deploy, and can scale to run on massive clusters with virtually no setup.

OpenStack and other VM-management tools need lots of configuration and they're still slow! minimega requires no configuration beyond a few optional command line arguments--it can even deploy itself to other cluster nodes if needed. It launches VMs fast, too; in a few seconds, you can launch and start as many VMs as your physical memory can hold--but thanks to minimega's KSM integration, duplicated memory pages will be compressed and you can start even more VMs!

The minimega repository also includes several more tools and libraries to make VM creation and cluster management easier

News

09 Mar 2020 - minimega training course released! See the mini101 page for more information.

29 Aug 2019 - minimega 2.6 is released! See the release notes for more information.

03 Oct 2018 - minimega 2.5 is released! See the release notes for more information.

11 May 2018 - minimega 2.4 is released! See the release notes for more information.

14 Dec 2016 - minimega 2.3 is released! Updates include many new features and bugfixes to the 2.2 release. See the release notes for more information.

24 Mar 2016 - minimega 2.2 is released! Updates include several bugfixes and tweaks to the 2.1 release, as well as support for full system containers. See the release notes for more information.

Getting Started

The Installation Guide contains instructions for fetching and installing minimega. Once you've installed it, the User's Guide will help you get started using minimega. It also provides online help for individual commands.

Training

The mini101 class page contains a comprehensive set of modules for learning how to use minimega. The first module is an all-in-one top-to-bottom guide for getting up and running quickly. The remaining modules represent a comprehensive walkthrough of nearly all the features minimega has to offer, including the other tools in the suite.

Support

minimega's mailing list is called minimega-dev, feel free to ask questions.