MULTIPASS
Easily create instant virtual machines
Stuart Burns helps you to master Multipass, the virtualisation platform that runs on any desktop platform.
OUR EXPERT
Stuart Burns is a cloud-and security-focused administrator specialising in large-scale virtual implementations.
Developers like to be able to launch virtual machines quickly for testing, but when developers write code on different platforms it can become a bit more complex to test if they have to use different virtualisation stacks.
Fortunately, Ubuntu provides a solution for quick, disposable Ubuntu-based virtual machines on Intelbased machines, and it’s even supported on the new Mac M1 based devices (with a few limitations, naturally). This virtualisation software is called Multipass.
Multipass is basically a front-end tool to start virtual machines, but it can support many varied back ends including VirtualBox, LXD, KVM and others. Multipass is essentially an abstracted automation tool to create a VM on the underlying hypervisor, which is why it can work on most platforms because the underlying hypervisor works on those platforms.
To install Multipass locally is straightforward. Multipass on Linux does require snap to be installed first but that shouldn’t be a problem with most modern Linux distributions. Install it and confirm installation using the commands below: