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Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

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Re: Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

#11
post #3

Reimplementing libvirt, badly ...

Everytime I try to like libvirt, I start reading the documentation and want to claw my eyes out when I remember just how complicated it makes things.

libvirt might be ok if you really need to try to be independent of virtualization technology (though from the looks of it, doing so still requires you to limit yourself to a small subset of functionality) and have really complicated needs, but for a lot of use cases it is ludicrous amounts of overkill.

Re: Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

#12
I'm not sure what are the benefits of supporting many VM providers for a tool that is meant for development (as far as I understand at least). Isn't VirtualBox sufficient? It is open source and runs on Linux, OS X and MS Windows. Perhaps I am missing some core idea.

Then there is veewee[1] which started life as a Vagrant plugin but as of version 0.3.0 it can be used standalone and one can ssh to the boxes using it, just like with Vagrant. If they were to add provisioning it would probably be an alternative to Vagrant feature for feature so maybe we're seeing a bit of competition between these two tools there.

On Ubuntu there is VMBuilder[2] written in Python but it doesn't offer provisioning as far as I know.

Last, as others have mentioned there is libvirt[3] which offers tools for communicating with different VMs but I don't think it offers a tool that matches what Vagrant does 1:1 (most notably the provisioning part).

1. https://github.com/jedi4ever/veewee/blob/master/doc/README-c...

2. https://launchpad.net/vmbuilder

3. http://libvirt.org

Re: Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

#13

> Showing 122 changed files with 4,156 additions and 2,915 deletions. Wow, that's a lot of code for a tool which is doing little more than creating, starting, stopping, deleting, and zipping-up VMs. Looking at this diff, all I can say is: Holy Java-ish Ruby, Batman! Most of these classes contain two non-helper methods: init and call. That's not a class; that's a function! I'm reminded of this talk, titled "Stop Writi…

Yes, the project seems to have around 380 files. I'd be interested to hear from the author if he's reading this thread why the codebase is at this size. Perhaps VirtualBox quirks necessitate a large part of it?

Re: Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

#14

I'm not sure what are the benefits of supporting many VM providers for a tool that is meant for development (as far as I understand at least). Isn't VirtualBox sufficient? It is open source and runs on Linux, OS X and MS Windows. Perhaps I am missing some core idea. Then there is veewee[1] which started life as a Vagrant plugin but as of version 0.3.0 it can be used standalone and one can ssh to the boxes using it, j…

veewee is being merged into vagrant.

Re: Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

#15

This is exciting news. I know one fellow who built a large private cloud for his organisation (about two racks of topline gear) so that they could simulate an architecture of several dozen servers and thousands of complex, concurrent transations. What's it built on? VMWare. He was not totally amused when I sent him a link to Vagrant. (I understand VMWare have similar fleet-orchestration tools, but not development-ori…

LXC is great but does have its limitations. We are currently building a vagrant like solution and GUI for LXC/Vagrant/vSphere/ESXi/Xen/AWS etc which will launch in beta in the next couple of months - sign up at http://10xlabs.net if you are interested in following progress

Re: Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

#16

> Showing 122 changed files with 4,156 additions and 2,915 deletions. Wow, that's a lot of code for a tool which is doing little more than creating, starting, stopping, deleting, and zipping-up VMs. Looking at this diff, all I can say is: Holy Java-ish Ruby, Batman! Most of these classes contain two non-helper methods: init and call. That's not a class; that's a function! I'm reminded of this talk, titled "Stop Writi…

Yes, the project seems to have around 380 files. I'd be interested to hear from the author if he's reading this thread why the codebase is at this size. Perhaps VirtualBox quirks necessitate a large part of it?

Vagrant does have support for the general case, where something in 7 lines will be a bit more specific. For example, Vagrant will handle cross distro/OS NFS shared folders.

Re: Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

#17
post #14

I'm not sure what are the benefits of supporting many VM providers for a tool that is meant for development (as far as I understand at least). Isn't VirtualBox sufficient? It is open source and runs on Linux, OS X and MS Windows. Perhaps I am missing some core idea. Then there is veewee[1] which started life as a Vagrant plugin but as of version 0.3.0 it can be used standalone and one can ssh to the boxes using it, j…

veewee is being merged into vagrant.

I wasn't aware of this. Have you seen anything that supports it?

Re: Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

#18

I'm not sure what are the benefits of supporting many VM providers for a tool that is meant for development (as far as I understand at least). Isn't VirtualBox sufficient? It is open source and runs on Linux, OS X and MS Windows. Perhaps I am missing some core idea. Then there is veewee[1] which started life as a Vagrant plugin but as of version 0.3.0 it can be used standalone and one can ssh to the boxes using it, j…

Building a product on top of another isn't the best of ideas (without having alternatives). Plus, VB is Oracle.

Re: Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

#19

> Showing 122 changed files with 4,156 additions and 2,915 deletions. Wow, that's a lot of code for a tool which is doing little more than creating, starting, stopping, deleting, and zipping-up VMs. Looking at this diff, all I can say is: Holy Java-ish Ruby, Batman! Most of these classes contain two non-helper methods: init and call. That's not a class; that's a function! I'm reminded of this talk, titled "Stop Writi…

See the recent thread on HN, one writes a useful tool, gives it away, top voted comment on HN is a sniping comment about code style.

Re: Vagrant core no longer tied to VirtualBox

#20

I'm not sure what are the benefits of supporting many VM providers for a tool that is meant for development (as far as I understand at least). Isn't VirtualBox sufficient? It is open source and runs on Linux, OS X and MS Windows. Perhaps I am missing some core idea. Then there is veewee[1] which started life as a Vagrant plugin but as of version 0.3.0 it can be used standalone and one can ssh to the boxes using it, j…

I believe that Oz and Heat (http://heat-api.org/) are built on libvirt.

I hate all these daft code names ...

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