I have a Vagrant set up with 3 virtual machines. Each machine has its own shell script for provisioning.
Now I would like to share the exact same status of my set up with somebody else. Since the provisioning procedure takes really (!!) long for each machine, I hope there is another solution.
Ideally I would be able to save each machine as it is in one file, which the other person then could import into Virtualbox. Is there a way to do that?
If I understand you correctly you would like to make a Vagrant base box from provisioned by Vagrant VMs. This is not recommended way to go. How you can approach this is:
Create new VM manually with required OS in the VBox.
Adjust it so Vagrant can connect to it as described here and here.
Provision it using your shell scripts.
Install all the things you would find useful to have on this VM.
Use Vagrant to package it as a base box as described here.
After packaging it with Vagrant you will get a Vagrant base box file with .box extension. You can then pass this to your team mates (usb, network share, ftp etc.) and they can add it to their Vagrant installation and use it. Whenever they will do Vagrant up they will get fully provisioned VM in VBox with all the stuff you have packaged to it. Vagrant also gives you versioning capabilities. If properly configured whenever you will create new version of base box everybody who is using it will be notified and would be able to download and use new version of your box.
Hope I understood your problem correctly and this will help to solve it.
Related
I have tried installing latest versions of VirtualBox and Vagrant, but I keep receiving the error message below when trying to run vagrant. How can I find the problem and correct it?
No usable default provider could be found for your system.
Vagrant relies on interactions with 3rd party systems, known as
"providers", to provide Vagrant with resources to run development
environments. Examples are VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V.
The easiest solution to this message is to install VirtualBox, which
is available for free on all major platforms.
If you believe you already have a provider available, make sure it
is properly installed and configured. You can see more details about
why a particular provider isn't working by forcing usage with
`vagrant up --provider=PROVIDER`, which should give you a more specific
error message for that particular provider.
Be sure to install VirtualBox first, since Vagrant depends on it.
-Download and install VirtualBox
-Download and install Vagrant
-Adjust VirtualBox and Vagrant
The next step is to make some tweaks to VirtualBox and Vagrant. We need to do this because, by default, both tools store data in the same drive where they were installed (tipically the C drive). The thing with virtual machines is they can take up a lot of space, so they can eat up your main drive’s storage very quickly.
First we’ll change the storage path in Virtual Box, since it’s pretty straightforward. You now should have a program called Oracle VM VirtualBox installed. Open it and then go to File > Preferences. A
new dialog will open where you can change the folder next to the option that reads Default Machine Folder. Click the dropdown and choose Other…. Here you can choose the new folder for VirtualBox to store data.
Now we’ll do the same for Vagrant.
By default the path where data related to virtual machines is
stored is C:\Users\YourUser\.vagrant.d so I recommend changing it to a different drive. This can be done with environment variables. We need to create a variable called VAGRANT_HOME and point it to our desired location.
Open the control panel and search for the word environment. From the results choose the one that says edit environment variables for your account.
On the new dialog that appears, click the New… button.
Here you will create the new variable. Enter VAGRANT_HOME as the value for the field named Variable name.
For the field named Variable value enter the path of your choice. In my case I used C:\VM\Vagrant
Hadoop & Vagrant: If I set up a new VM using these two packages, is the VM available for starting with VirtualBox or do I always have to use vagrant up?
When you first create the VM, you will need to use vagrant up since VirtualBox has no ability to read a Vagrantfile. Once your VM is up and running, you could stop and start it using VirtualBox. However, Vagrant can perform the same operations as VirtualBox and has a lot of advantages on top of that.
First let's discuss how Vagrant can do what VirtualBox can do. You can use vagrant suspend to put the VM in a saved state, vagrant resume to start it again, vagrant halt to power it off, and vagrant destroy to delete it. You can also use settings in Vagrant's VirtualBox provider to modify your VM's memory, CPUs, and more. You can also change the network settings and synced folders. And this gives you the advantage of defining all of these settings in code which can be checked into a revision control system such as Git.
On top of all this, Vagrant has support for provisioners. These range from something as simple as shell scripts to full blown configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt. Just like you can define your VM's VirtualBox settings in code, you can define the entire creation process including installing packages, managing services, and customizing files. And you can make changes at any time and apply them using vagrant provision.
So getting back to your question... yes, you can control your VM directly with VirtualBox, but you'd be missing out on the rich feature set of Vagrant.
I was messing with systemd in my Vagrant box and I think I did something wrong since the box won't boot anymore. What I need to do is to remove certain files under /etc/systemd in my Vagrant box. However since I can't boot it, I have to remove those files from the host, but I don't know how to do it.
The VM provider is virtualbox. Both the host and the guest are ubuntu 15.04.
Thanks in advance!
option 1: you can try to add vagrant ssh -c 'cmd to run' in your vagrant file, but as you said it really does not boot, I give it really low chance to success.
option 2: create a new VM and add the hard drive from the old box to the new box (add new hard drive from existing disk), boot it and you might need to mount the new hard drive then you should be able to access your data so make the change in your /etc/systemd or whatever files you need and save. once you have made all your fix, you should be able to reboot from the old vm.
I ended up just creating a new VM but I'm fairly certain that this would work: you just mount the virtual disk file (.vmdk in my case) as a hard drive and make the fix. For different formats of virtual disks you need different tools to mount them, which I'm not going to cover here.
I mounted a vagrant machine several time ago.I have modified some configurations to the VM since the installation and now my co-workers need to use exactly the same VM.
How can I do it ? I would like keep the database i used for my co-workers too if it's possible.
Look into VagrantCloud: https://vagrantcloud.com/
I'm using that service to host a customized box for my team. Started from a vanilla box, customized it to match our environment, then used the "vagrant package" command to create a new *.box file. You just need to host that file somewhere online, register it with the VagrantCloud service, and you can manage box releases and deployments for your co-workers. It even notifies them if you update the box. Pretty nifty.
As far as the DB, if it is in the VM it will get packaged up too. Might wat to look into providing updated DB files for later since they will get out of date fast, I would imagine.
I like how through vagrant I can spin up my machine, configure it and get to coding. However when I do vagrant halt, and then do a vagrant up again, it rebuilds my machine from the base box. All the new stuff I installed, my project repository is gone.
I can see that the virtual machine still exists in virtual box and I can use it from there, but I want to use vagrant to manage it and access it while keep the persistence of the disk as I would accessing it directly from virtual box. My host is windows, my guest is precise64.
Thoughts?
Stephen
Maybe you want to use vagrant suspend? (via)