Hypervisors
A number of different hypervisors are supported by Minikube. A hypervisor is a process that is used to launch the virtual machine; it isolates the virtual machine's operating system from your own while allowing it to share resources such as CPU, RAM, and drive space.
The following hypervisors are supported out-of-the-box by Minikube:
- Hyper-V (Windows 10): This is the native hypervisor; it is available in Windows 10 Professional and Windows Servers
- KVM (Ubuntu 17.04): This is the native Linux hypervisor, which operates inside the Linux kernel on most modern distributions
- VirtualBox (macOS, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 17.04): Released by Oracle, VirtualBox is an open source x86 hypervisor which can be run on a large number of operating systems
- VMware Fusion (macOS): Fusion provides a macOS-optimized hypervisor whose biggest strength is its ability to run and expose Windows applications on macOS
- xhyve (macOS): This is the native hypervisor on macOS; like KVM on Linux, it is built into the kernel
As you can tell from the list, only VirtualBox is supported across all three of the operating systems we are covering in this chapter. Because of this, it is the default hypervisor supported by Minikube. If you have already got VirtualBox installed, you can run the following commands, which are relevant to your choice of operating system.
For macOS, we can use Homebrew and Cask to install VirtualBox by running:
$ brew cask install virtualbox
Likewise, for Windows 10 you can use Chocolatey to install VirtualBox:
You cannot use VirtualBox on Windows 10 if Hyper-V is enabled. If you wish to follow along, please disable Hyper-V before proceeding.
$ choco install virtualbox
Finally, for Ubuntu 17.04 you will need to run the following commands to add the repository and key:
$ wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -sc) contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
And then run the following commands to load the repository we added previously and install the package:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-5.1
You should now be able to see Virtualbox in your listed software programs.