Create Instance of Small VM Catalog Item

This guide walks you through deploying a virtual machine on a KubeVirt service provider by creating a catalog item instance using the DCM CLI.

Prerequisites

• DCM services running with the KubeVirt profile (see Local Setup)
• A KubeVirt service provider registered with DCM
• The small-vm catalog item created (see Create Small VM Catalog Item)
• The dcm CLI installed and in your PATH

Define the Catalog Item Instance

Create a file called my-vm.yaml with the following content:

api_version: v1alpha1
display_name: "My Dev VM"
spec:
  catalog_item_id: small-vm
  user_values:
    - resource: main
      path: metadata
      value:
        name: "small-vm"
        labels:
          env: "dev"
    - resource: main
      path: vcpu.count
      value: 1

Each user_values entry specifies which resource (by name) it applies to. For single-resource catalog items like small-vm, this is the name of the sole resource (main).

This creates a VM instance based on the small-vm catalog item with:

• Metadata — sets the VM name to small-vm with a dev environment label
• 1 vCPU — overriding the default of 2

Create the Instance

dcm catalog instance create --from-file my-vm.yaml --id my-dev-vm

Verify the Instance

dcm catalog instance get my-dev-vm

You can also view the full details in YAML format:

dcm catalog instance get my-dev-vm -o yaml

Check the Resource Status

You can check the status of the underlying resource from the service provider resource manager:

dcm sp resource get my-dev-vm

Example output:

ID         PROVIDER                     STATUS      CREATED
my-dev-vm  kubevirt-service-provider  Scheduling  2026-03-25T13:01:46.496278Z