Vagrant

Vagrant is an open-source software product for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments,^[4] e.g. for VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Docker, VMware, and AWS which try to simplify software configuration management of virtualizations in order to increase development productivity. Vagrant is written in the Ruby language, but its ecosystem supports development in almost all major languages.

Vagrant is a nice tool and I really like it. Starting using Vagrant is simple but it can lead problems. The problems are not Vagrant related because the software is nice, but how other people support it.

I used it with Virtualbox and I will list some nice things and bad things related to the experience. The base of using vagrant is a box (compressed disk image file)

Nice things:

• Easy to run a box
• Good documentation
• Lovely integration with Ansible (dynamic discovery)
• support for multiple virtual machines
• virtual machine customization
• no demand for using the Ruby programming language (but it can help)
• networking works out-of-the-box
• private networking (connecting to assigned IP from the host)
• greate user base with excellent "boxes"

Bad things:

• Creating boxes is a complex process
• Official boxes are broken (Ubuntu 16.04)
  Since it doesn't contain vagrant user functionality is limited and problematic
• Links to boxes are not valid or not valid anymore
• Some official boxes don't integrate virtualbox add-ons which can cause issues
• Experimentation is needed to find suitable boxes
• It doesn't use cloning feature of virtualbox and therefore if we use many virtual machines base box get expanded as many machines as we have
  

Vagrant is a nice tool that needs to be examined more. In following blog entries I will explain multi-machine setup.