Multipass on Windows

Download the installer from this link

Run the installer and follow the prompts to complete the installation.

Install VirtualBox and PsTools

Download and install VirtualBox from the official website.
Make sure you install VirtualBox driver as administrator.

Download and install PsTools from the official website.
Make sure you add the PsTools directory to your system PATH or environment PATH so that you can use the following tools in the command line. Basically, we will use PsTools to see the VM instances in VirtualBox, as Multipass runs as the System account.

Use VirtualBox as the driver

By default, Multipass uses Hyper-V as the virtualization backend on Windows. To use VirtualBox instead, you need to specify it as the driver when launching instances.

multipass set local.driver=virtualbox

If you faced Waiting for Daemon to start error, you can force kill the service. You can understand more about this in the Multipasas Service Stuck for windows

Get-WmiObject win32_service | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq "Multipass" } | Select-Object ProcessId
Stop-Process -Id <PID> -Force

Set Bridged Network

To allow the VM to communicate with the host machine and other devices on the network, you need to set up a bridged network. This allows the VM to obtain an IP address from the same network as the host.

First, find your networks.

PS C:\Users\karchunt> multipass networks
Name         Type       Description
Ethernet 5   ethernet   Lenovo USB Ethernet
Wi-Fi        wifi       Intel(R) Wi-Fi 6 AX201 160MHz 

In this case, I will use Wi-Fi as the network interface, that's because I'm using Wi-Fi to connect to the internet, so the VM will get the same network segment as the host machine.

multipass set local.bridged-network="Wi-Fi"

Launch a VM instance

Here, I'm going to show you with/without SSH setup, you can choose either one that suits your needs.
If you want to launch a VM instance, make sure you set bridged network to create a bridge between the host and the VM.

Without SSH setup

multipass launch --bridged --name primary

With SSH setup

If you want to setup SSH access to the VM, we have to provide some config to the VM instance. I'm going to use the standard tool called cloud-init to configure the VM instance.

# It can be any username, this will be used to log into the VM instance.
ssh-keygen -C <username> -f  <file-path>
ssh-keygen -C karchunt -f multipass-ssh-key

Go to this location, C:\Users\<user>\.ssh\<file>.pub to get the public key, in my case it is C:\Users\karchunt\.ssh\multipass-ssh-key.pub. After that we will need to create a cloud-init config file. This file will be used to configure the VM instance when it is launched.

users:
  - default
  - name: karchunt # Replace your username here
    sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
    ssh_authorized_keys:
      - <Your Public Key that just generated> # Replace your public key here

Finally, you can launch the VM instance with the cloud-init.yaml config file.

multipass launch --bridged --name primary --cloud-init cloud-init.yaml

Access the VM instance

There are multiple ways to access the VM instance, you can use multipass shell, multipass exec, or ssh command (If you setup SSH). Here are the examples:

multipass shell primary
multipass exec primary -- bash

For SSH access, since we're in proxy (VPN) environment, we cannot direct SSH into the IP address of the VM instance. Therefore, we need to port-forward the SSH port to the host machine, also we have to use localhost instead of IP address of the VM instance. Normally, the VM instance already automate port-forwarding the SSH port to the host machine, but if it doesn't work, you can manually set it up.

To see the port-forwarding configuration, you have to use the PsTools to launch VirtualBox GUI. Remember to launch the PowerShell or Command Prompt as Administrator.

PsExec -s -i $env:VBOX_MSI_INSTALL_PATH\VirtualBox.exe

The direction here is to select your VM instance, go to Settings > Network > NAT Adapter Network > Port Forwarding.

ssh <username>@localhost -i "<private key path>" -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -p <port number>
ssh karchunt@localhost -i "C:\Users\karchunt\.ssh\multipass-ssh-key" -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -p 56041

[Optional]: Launch a web server

You can launch a web server on the VM instance and access it from the host machine. FOr example, you can use python to launch a simple HTTP server.

multipass shell primary # access the VM instance
python3 -m http.server # it will expose port 8000

Now you need to port-forward the HTTP port to the host machine. There are two ways to do this, either using GUI or using PSTools.

PsExec -s $env:VBOX_MSI_INSTALL_PATH\VBoxManage.exe controlvm "<vm-name>" natpf1 "<any-name-you-like>,<protocol>,,<host-port>,,<vm-port>"
 
PsExec -s $env:VBOX_MSI_INSTALL_PATH\VBoxManage.exe controlvm "primary" natpf1 "myservice,tcp,,8000,,8000"

This will forward all TCP traffic from port 8000 on the host machine to port 8000 on the VM instance named primary. You can access the web server from your host machine using http://localhost:8000.

For more information, you can refer to the VirtualBox documentation.