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Installation for Slicer

Don't wait for the perfect system. Slicer can run practically anywhere.

To activate Slicer, you'll need a Home Edition or Commercial subscription - pick according to your needs. Both are available on a monthly basis.

After the installation, when you run slicer activate you'll get an invite link to the Discord server. We highly recommend joining.

System requirements

Any reasonably modern computer can run Slicer, the requirements are very low - x86_64 or Arm64 (including the Raspberry Pi).

Ideal for labs and the home office:

Cloud-based bare-metal:

Additional cloud-based options for KVM are included on this page on our sister site (Actuated)

Enterprise:

  • On-premises datacenter with your own bare-metal servers
  • OpenStack / VMware (with nested virtualisation)
  • Azure, DigitalOcean, GCP VMs (with nested virtualisation)

A Linux system with KVM is required (bare-metal or nested virtualisation), so if you see /dev/kvm, Slicer will work there.

Ubuntu LTS is formally supported, whilst Debian, Fedora, RHEL-like Operating Systems (Rocky, Alma, CentOS), and Arch Linux should work - we won't be able to debug your system.

Ideally, nothing else should be installed on a host that runs Slicer. It should be thought of as a basic appliance - a bare OS, with minimal packages.

Quick installation

The default slicer installation only enables support for image storage. Additional storage backends for zfs or devmapper can be enabled using the --zfs and --devmapper flags. See Snapshot-based storage.

curl -sLS https://get.slicervm.com | sudo bash

The installer sets up Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor, containerd for storage, and a few networking options.

Feel free to read/verify the installation script before running it.

Additional storage backends can always be enabled later by running the installer again with the appropriate flags.

For Home Edition/Hobbyist users, activate Slicer with your GitHub account to obtain a license key:

slicer activate --help

slicer activate

Pro/Commercial users should save their license key (received by email after checking out) to ~/.slicer/LICENSE without running any additional commands.

Next, start your first VM with the walk through.

Snapshot-based storage

Snapshot-based storage enables much faster VM creation times. ZFS is the recommended option for Slicer, devmapper is also supported. See storage for slicer for more info on the different storage backends.

For best performance using a dedicated drive, volume or partition for the storage backend is recommended. If no disk is provided a loopback device will be created automatically.

ZFS on non-Ubuntu distributions

Automatic ZFS installation is only supported on Ubuntu. On other distributions, install ZFS manually before running the install script with the --zfs flag.

ZFS (loopback)

curl -sLS https://get.slicervm.com | sudo bash -s -- \
  --zfs

ZFS (dedicated drive)

curl -sLS https://get.slicervm.com | sudo bash -s -- \
  --zfs /dev/sdb

Devmapper (loopback)

curl -sLS https://get.slicervm.com | sudo bash -s -- \
  --devmapper

Devmapper (dedicated drive)

curl -sLS https://get.slicervm.com | sudo bash -s -- \
  --devmapper /dev/sdb

The --devmapper and --zfs flags can be used together to enable both storage backends.

Updating slicer

To update Slicer, use the slicer update command:

sudo -E slicer update

Alternatively, if you're on an earlier version, repeat this command from the installation step:

sudo -E arkade oci install ghcr.io/openfaasltd/slicer:latest \
  --path /usr/local/bin