Tutorial: Local VM Provisioning
This tutorial walks through the complete rdc ops workflow: checking system requirements, provisioning a minimal VM cluster, running commands on VMs over SSH, and tearing everything down.
Prerequisites
- A Linux or macOS workstation with hardware virtualization enabled
- The
rdcCLI installed and a config initialized with the local adapter - KVM/libvirt (Linux) or QEMU (macOS) installed — see Experimental VMs for setup instructions
Interactive Recording
What You’ll See
The recording above walks through each step below. Use the playback bar to navigate between commands.
Step 1: Verify system requirements
rdc ops check
Checks for hardware virtualization support, required packages (libvirt, QEMU), and network configuration. This must pass before you can provision VMs.
Step 2: Provision a minimal VM cluster
rdc ops up --basic --skip-orchestration
Creates a two-VM cluster: a bridge VM (1 CPU, 1024 MB RAM, 8 GB disk) and a worker VM (2 CPU, 4096 MB RAM, 16 GB disk). The --skip-orchestration flag skips Rediacc platform provisioning, giving you bare VMs with SSH access only.
Step 3: Check cluster status
rdc ops status
Shows the state of each VM in the cluster — IP addresses, resource allocation, and running status.
Step 4: Run commands on a VM
rdc ops ssh 1 hostname
rdc ops ssh 1 uname -a
Runs commands on the bridge VM (ID 1) over SSH. You can pass any command after the VM ID. For an interactive shell, omit the command: rdc ops ssh 1.
Step 5: Tear down the cluster
rdc ops down
Destroys all VMs and cleans up resources. The cluster can be reprovisioned at any time with rdc ops up.
Next Steps
- Experimental VMs — full reference for
rdc opscommands, VM configuration, and platform support - Machine Setup — add remote machines to your config and provision them
- Quick Start — deploy a containerized service end-to-end