![]() Why Use Vagrant and Virtualbox?īuilding a software prototyping environment (aka lab) is far simpler than ever before. In summary, this is a time-saving tool for standing up VMs faster, configuring them, adding packages to VMs, or integrating your virtual platforms with tools like Ansible. It allows for some fundamental integration and automation with platforms like VirtualBox, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, etc. Vagrantis a time-saving open source ( MIT) tool from our friends at HashiCorp. For advanced users, it also has some command line, advanced networking capabilities, and integrates nicely with Vagrant. Your virtual machines will be hosted in this on top of your base OS, sharing its resources. VirtualBoxis an open source ( GPL v2) virtualization platform that works on almost any base OS. In this blog, we give an overview of VirtualBox and Vagrant, how they can combine to form a virtual prototyping environment, and instructions for setting up your first lab. But if you use Vagrant and VirtualBox, you can virtualize and save time. It should come as no surprise that two HashiCorp tools are able to work together in this way.Virtualization can be time-consuming, especially in open source. One way to do this is with Packer, an image builder also from HashiCorp specifically, the Vagrant builder for Packer. This means that if you ever need to tear down and re-create your image, or if you want to have multiple machines that all use the same base image, you can save yourself some provisioning time. The recommended solution for this is to “pre-bake” your environment into a box, and then reference this box in your Vagrantfile. If Vagrant development enviroments are meant to be truly disposable, and re-buildable, they should be easy to dispose and re-build. Spinning up a Vagrant machine usually involves starting from a base Debian or Ubuntu image, then provisioning it with shell scripts or something like Ansible or Chef.ĭepending on how much there is to provision, this can end up taking quite a bit of time, which means there’s more of a downside to halting or destroying a running machine to save on disk space. ![]()
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March 2023
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