minikube/docs/drivers.md

Driver plugin installation

Minikube uses Docker Machine to manage the Kubernetes VM so it benefits from the driver plugin architecture that Docker Machine uses to provide a consistent way to manage various VM providers. Minikube embeds VirtualBox and VMware Fusion drivers so there are no additional steps to use them. However, other drivers require an extra binary to be present in the host PATH.

The following drivers currently require driver plugin binaries to be present in the host PATH:

• KVM2
• Hyperkit
• HyperV
• VMware

KVM2 driver

To install the KVM2 driver, first install and configure the prereqs:

• Debian or Ubuntu 18.x:

sudo apt install libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system qemu-kvm

• Ubuntu 16.x or older:

sudo apt install libvirt-bin libvirt-daemon-system qemu-kvm

• Fedora/CentOS/RHEL:

sudo yum install libvirt-daemon-kvm qemu-kvm

Enable,start, and verify the libvirtd service has started.

sudo systemctl enable libvirtd.service
sudo systemctl start libvirtd.service
sudo systemctl status libvirtd.service

Then you will need to add yourself to libvirt group (older distributions may use libvirtd instead)

sudo usermod -a -G libvirt $(whoami)

Then to join the group with your current user session:

newgrp libvirt

Now install the driver:

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/docker-machine-driver-kvm2 \
  && sudo install docker-machine-driver-kvm2 /usr/local/bin/

NOTE: Ubuntu users on a release older than 18.04, or anyone experiencing #3206: Error creating new host: dial tcp: missing address. you will need to build your own driver until #3689 is resolved. Building this binary will require Go v1.12 or newer to be installed.

$ sudo apt install libvirt-dev
$ git clone https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube.git
$ cd minikube
$ make out/docker-machine-driver-kvm2
$ sudo install out/docker-machine-driver-kvm2 /usr/local/bin

To use the kvm2 driver:

minikube start --vm-driver kvm2

or, to use kvm2 as a default driver:

minikube config set vm-driver kvm2

and run minikube as usual:

minikube start

Hyperkit driver

Install the hyperkit VM manager using brew:

brew install hyperkit

Then install the most recent version of minikube's fork of the hyperkit driver:

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/docker-machine-driver-hyperkit \
&& sudo install -o root -g wheel -m 4755 docker-machine-driver-hyperkit /usr/local/bin/

If you are using dnsmasq in your setup and cluster creation fails (stuck at kube-dns initialization) you might need to add listen-address=192.168.64.1 to dnsmasq.conf.

Note: If dnsmasq.conf contains listen-address=127.0.0.1 kubernetes discovers dns at 127.0.0.1:53 and tries to use it using bridge ip address, but dnsmasq replies only to requests from 127.0.0.1

To use the driver:

minikube start --vm-driver hyperkit

or, to use hyperkit as a default driver for minikube:

minikube config set vm-driver hyperkit

HyperV driver

Hyper-v users may need to create a new external network switch as described here. This step may prevent a problem in which minikube start hangs indefinitely, unable to ssh into the minikube virtual machine. In this add, add the --hyperv-virtual-switch=switch-name argument to the minikube start command.

On some machines, having dynamic memory management turned on for the minikube VM can cause problems of unexpected and random restarts which manifests itself in simply losing the connection to the cluster, after which minikube status would simply state stopped. Machine restarts are caused due to following Hyper-V error: The dynamic memory balancer could not add memory to the virtual machine 'minikube' because its configured maximum has been reached. Solution: turned the dynamic memory management in hyper-v settings off (and allocate a fixed amount of memory to the machine).

To use the driver:

minikube start --vm-driver hyperv --hyperv-virtual-switch=switch-name

or, to use hyperv as a default driver:

minikube config set vm-driver hyperv && minikube config set hyperv-virtual-switch switch-name

and run minikube as usual:

minikube start

VMware unified driver

The VMware unified driver will eventually replace the existing vmwarefusion driver. The new unified driver supports both VMware Fusion (on macOS) and VMware Workstation (on Linux and Windows)

To install the vmware unified driver, head over at https://github.com/machine-drivers/docker-machine-driver-vmware/releases and download the release for your operating system.

The driver must be:

1. Stored in $PATH
2. Named docker-machine-driver-vmware
3. Executable (chmod +x on UNIX based platforms)

If you're running on macOS with Fusion, this is an easy way install the driver:

export LATEST_VERSION=$(curl -L -s -H 'Accept: application/json' https://github.com/machine-drivers/docker-machine-driver-vmware/releases/latest | sed -e 's/.*"tag_name":"\([^"]*\)".*/\1/') \
&& curl -L -o docker-machine-driver-vmware https://github.com/machine-drivers/docker-machine-driver-vmware/releases/download/$LATEST_VERSION/docker-machine-driver-vmware_darwin_amd64 \
&& chmod +x docker-machine-driver-vmware \
&& mv docker-machine-driver-vmware /usr/local/bin/

To use the driver:

minikube start --vm-driver vmware

or, to use vmware unified driver as a default driver:

minikube config set vm-driver vmware

and run minikube as usual:

minikube start