We have been using VM’s (Virtual Machines) for years. VM’s are an affordable way to create a lab environment where when something goes wrong, no damage is done and we just spin up another VM instance. Virtualbox has been around for some time and has always been the defacto VM manager when I needed to demo new technologies or build customer use-cases. I built a full LTE Core using VBox and ran the demo from my laptop - amazing when you think about it…

Lately I have been diving into O-RAN and wanted to try something new. Enter Multipass from Canonical, the folks who brought us Ubuntu Linux. Now spinning up a new VM takes less than 60 seconds and you don’t have to go through any of the installation “interview” questions when booting from an .iso image directly. Running on Linux, MacOS or Windows, Multipass is a game changer in our lab. Going into everything that Multipass can do is beyond the scope of this post but I will share the formula I use to get a VM with 8 vCPU, 28GB vRAM and 160GB disk:

multipass launch -c 8 -m 28G -d 160G 18.04 --name my-ubuntu1804-vm

Follow the link to the Multipass page and share your experiences with VM’s in the comments!