Rapid VM Deployment using Vagrant

I need a VM and I need it asap.

Vagrant is designed to be the quickest way to a running VM, and I’m impressed. I have VirtualBox running on my trusty Dell XPS 13 laptop; “Sputnik” (named after the collaboration between Ubuntu and Dell).

Installing Virtualbox and Vagrant on Linux Mint (or any Debian/Ubuntu derivative) is as easy as typing…

sudo apt-get install virtualbox vagrant

…and thanks to Vagrant and the many virtual machines available for VirtualBox and VMWare platforms, getting your first VM up and running is as simple as typing…

vagrant init centos/7 or vagrant init debian/jessie64

or vagrant init hashicorp/precise64 the latter hashicorp Ubuntu LTS build being the one that Vagrant’s own documentation is based upon. For my example here, I’m going to start with a RHEL based Centos 7 offering..

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This creates a text file called Vagrantfile in the current directory.

Rather than have this file in the root of my home directory, I’ve relocated it to a subdirectory ~/Vagrant/Centos7. This will allow me to have other Vagrantfiles for other types of VM all stored under ~/Vagrant in their own subdirectory. Probably not a bad idea as I’ll likely want to spin up a few different VM’s over time.

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I’m now ready to “up” my VM…

vagrant up

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Since I don’t already have a copy of the image downloaded, it goes off to sort all that for you. While it’s doing that, there’s nothing stopping me from spinning up an Ubuntu Precise64 VM in another terminal window…

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Since I already had the hashicorp/precise64 “Box” image from a previous deployment, it procured this VM in seconds while it continued to download the Centos Box image in the other terminal.

In my other terminal window, Centos 7 has now also been procured, along with some helpful tips should any issues arise around non-installation of VirtualBox Guest Additions on my host (In my case, I’m running VirtualBox version 5.1.34 at the time of writing).

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Flick across to VirtualBox Manager and you can see the two new running VMs based on the downloaded Boxes have been added to the Inventory. Note: Do not rename them.

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To connect to them, simply use the command…

vagrant ssh

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Both VM’s allow you to log on instantly over SSH with just this minimalist command run from within the directory containing the Vagrantfile.

So there you have it, a Centos VM and a Ubuntu VM up and running in seconds. Not hours. Not Days. Not Weeks.

It is that simple. From Zero to Virtualbox, Vagrant and logged on to a running VM of your choice in three commands and dare I say it, about three seconds.

To shut them down, or bring them online again, use the following commands, just make sure you run them from within the correct subdirectory or you could shut the wrong VM down…

vagrant halt

vagrant up

It’s worth checking out the Vagrantfile and the documentation online as you can copy and re-use the Vagrantfile and make useful modifications to it. Here are some more vagrant box commands to explore.

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You can see here that although the vagrant box list command shows all boxes/images downloaded on your host system, if you execute vagrant box outdated, it’ll only check for updated box images for the box image specified in your local Vagrantfile, not all Boxes on the host system at once.

Note that this is not the same thing as performing sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade (or redhat equivalent yum update command) on the VM built using the Box image (shown below).

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