Google Cloud Platform KVM Support

Question

I have just created a server in GCP. It is a Ubuntu that i want to use with GNS3. The problem is that machines created in GCP does not have KVM support. Is there sone way to use it in GCP? Regards!!

Answer 1

The GCP Compute Engine supports KVM virtualization module but isn't super clear about how to actually create the instance. Here is a concrete way to create a cloud instance that supports KVM.

gcloud compute instances create kvm1 \
    --zone=us-central1-a \
    --min-cpu-platform="Intel Haswell" \
    --image-project=ubuntu-os-cloud \
    --image=ubuntu-2004-focal-v20220610 \
    --boot-disk-size 200GB \
    --machine-type=n1-standard-16 \
    --enable-nested-virtualization

After creating the instance I SSHd into the machine to verify that KVM can be used:

>> ls /dev/kvm
/dev/kvm

>> egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo
32

>> sudo apt install cpu-checker
>> sudo kvm-ok
INFO: /dev/kvm exists
KVM acceleration can be used

This worked for my use-case of building AOSP.

Answer 2

For now GCP Compute Engine supports KVM based nested virtualization - check docs here.