Working with GMS virtual machines (vagrant virtualbox)

Introduction

For instructions on how to install the GMS within a vagrant/virtualbox virtual machine, refer to the installation documentation.

Following are some notes on configuring and working with GMS virtual machines

Once you clone the GMS installation repo:

git clone https://github.com/genome/gms.git
cd gms

You can modify the vagrantfile Vagrantfile.standalone.virtualbox to configure host resources used by the virtual machine. In particular refer to the --memory and --cpus options in this file. If you change anything in this file and your virtual machine is already running you must restart it as follows at a terminal session (while within the directory containing your vagrantfile):

vagrant reload

or

vagrant halt
vagrant up

Note that using vagrant suspend and vagrant resume will pause your VM but new system configurations in your Vagrantfile will not take effect.

Adjusting memory resources available to the virtual machine

For example, to increase the amount of memory from 10Gb to 24Gb, open the vagrant file and change this line:

v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", 10000]

to this:

v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", 24000]

Adjust CPU resources available to the virtual machine

Running multiple virtual machines concurrently on the same host system

If you want to run multiple GMS virtual machines concurrently you can clone the gms repo into multiple locations (e.g. 'gms1' and 'gms2') and install the GMS as normal in each of these. The one exception is that each of these must have a unique host port in their vagrant file Vagrantfile.standalone.virtualbox. For example,

gms1:

config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 80, host: 9003

gms2:

config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 80, host: 9004

Configuring disk storage of your virtual machine

To control the location of VDI images you will have to modify both Vagrantfile.standalone.virtualbox and setup/bin/vm-drive-setup-host.sh. For example, in Vagrantfile.standalone.virtualbox you might change vagrant_root + tmp-disk.vdi to /Volumes/Data1/tmp-disk.vdi. Similarly, in setup/bin/vm-drive-setup-host.sh you would replace all instances of tmp-disk.vdi with /Volumes/Data1/tmp-disk.vdi. And so on for other VDI locations.

Removing a GMS virtual machine installation

If you are testing the GMS installation you can start from scratch by simply exiting the VM, removing the VM by vagrant destroy in the directory with your vagrantfile and then simply deleting the entire directory where you cloned the GMS repo.