Vagrant up and its non-deterministic issues - vagrant

Question

Ok, I've started to use vagrant because a client uses it. Getting all the pieces together and make them work was truly painful... and now I'm facing a different kind of issue.
Once I run vagrant up there could be different results:
VM doesn't boot properly
Timed out while waiting for the machine to boot. This means that
Vagrant was unable to communicate with the guest machine within
the configured ("config.vm.boot_timeout" value) time period.
If you look above, you should be able to see the error(s) that
Vagrant had when attempting to connect to the machine. These errors
are usually good hints as to what may be wrong.
If you're using a custom box, make sure that networking is properly
working and you're able to connect to the machine. It is a common
problem that networking isn't setup properly in these boxes.
Verify that authentication configurations are also setup properly,
as well.
If the box appears to be booting properly, you may want to increase
the timeout ("config.vm.boot_timeout") value.
MySQL dies
default: ERROR 2006 (HY000) at line 1118: MySQL server has gone away
or
default: ERROR 1034 (HY000) at line 3720: Index for table 'ci_sessions' is corrupt; try to repair it
Works properly
I have to run back to back vagrant up and vagrant destroy commands, until my machine decides to boot and build properly. It's weird, I have no explanation for this, running the environment is such a gamble and takes me a lot of time until it works.
If someone knows anything about Vagrant or this strange issue, it would be very appreciated.
PD:
My Vagrantfile has been provisioned with
config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
v.memory = 4096
v.cpus = 3
end
Databases that are being loaded are huge (one of 5Gb) and I tried to include a sed command to improve max allowed package without success.
sudo sed -i "s#[client-server]#[client-server]\n\n[mysqld]\nmax_allowed_packet=256M#" /etc/my.cnf
I got this answer:
sed: -e expression #1, char 33: unterminated `s' command
It runs ok when I execute it at vagrant ssh but I'm not sure where to include it in my Vagrantfile.

Answer 1

I would speculate that a lot of stuff is going on in the VM during startup that either eats up resources, or just takes too long. You already point out that you give the VM only 4GB of RAM, but the database you try to load is 5GB, so the VM is likely thrashing the swap partition. That MySQL dies also suggests that you are not giving the VM the resources required.
Even if vagrant can't establish an SSH connection and times out, can you ssh into the box after a while (check "vagrant ssh-config")?
Increase RAM, and investigate (perhaps you can ask whoever packaged the box) what kind of services this VM launches as part of the boot process. Monitor whatever facilities the guest OS of the VM provides, and you should see what's going on in the VirtualBox GUI as well. Press whatever keys the guest OS uses for that purpose so that you don't just see some opaque boot screen.
As for your sed command, you can use a shell provisioner for that: https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/provisioning/shell; make sure you escape things properly when passing the command line via the inline attribute.