2. Boot it and look around

Bring the lab up, watch the template pull, and inspect it with status, console, and logs.

After this lesson you can

- Boot a lab with vmlab up (daemons start automatically) - Read vmlab status output: power, agent, leases - Open a VM's console and follow the lab log

Before you start: Install vmlab and validate a lab

vmlab up creates a linked clone per VM and boots them. On the first run the Alpine template is pulled from the registry into the local store — after that, ups are instant. You never start a daemon by hand: the CLI launches the supervisor and the per-lab daemon on demand.

While it runs: vmlab status shows each VM's power state, agent state, and DHCP lease; vmlab console alp opens a VNC viewer on the guest (add --tcp on WSL2 or over SSH); vmlab logs follows the lab's event log.

§ 1Exercise: Up, then prove it's up

Boot the lesson-1 lab and check the guest reached the running state with a lease.

console
vmlab up
vmlab status

Expected result

vmlab status lists alp as running with an agent and a 10.81.0.x lease.

Hint

First boot includes the registry pull — give it a minute. If up fails immediately, check /dev/kvm exists and is writable (ls -l /dev/kvm).