Vagrant 1.4

Not the parent post, but from my limited use of Vagrant so far, the main difference is that there's a "base" image that you can quickly reset to in order to test the repeat-ability of your deploys. The images also automatically handle VirtualBox's shared folders feature and require little for configuration.

Other than that, I agree it's almost like just using VBox directly.

The problem right now is that plugins create a screwed up state of the world and their usefulness is rapidly climbing.

Installing the vagrant-chef-zero plugin, for example, is a real PITA because the dependency resolution doesn't deal with a json dependency correctly leading to it or chef zero failing to load unless you install them in a very specific order.

On the other end of the spectrum, when you're writing a Vagrantfile it's technically almost impossible to know what's going to happen when a user starts it up because of all the hooks plugins can throw in, and you can't tell Vagrant not to load a plugin (which would be an incomplete solution anyways, since I can't know what plugins or plugin versions will have bad interactions).

I know you wrote vagrant, so you have a more inside perspective on this, but as a user and occasional plugin writer, it feels like with a gemfile I can specify a state of the world that's considerably less screwed up than the completely random world any given user's install of Vagrant might be.

Congratulations to mitchellh and the Vagrant team. Vagrant is a fantastic tool for streamlining workflows, but also an amazing educational opportunity. Disposable Linux servers: Play, experiment, destroy, try again. Thank you for this, I can't believe how much I've learned.

I use Vagrant daily. Here's an example I was working on today.

I needed to spin up 5 servers, a load balancer and 2 groups of 2 backend servers. I needed to provision them with Chef, have full name resolution, and be able to access the servers from my host machine.

Here's my Vagrantfile

    Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-chef-zero"
    Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-berkshelf"
    Vagrant.require_plugin "landrush"

    last_ip_octet = 10
    DOMAIN = "vagrant.dev"

    Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
      config.landrush.enable
      config.chef_zero.chef_repo_path = "./"
      config.omnibus.chef_version = '11.8.0'
      config.vm.box = "opscode_ubuntu-12.04_provisionerless"
      config.vm.box_url = "https://opscode-vm.s3.amazonaws.com/vagrant/opscode_ubuntu-12.04_provisionerless.box"

      %w{default metrics}.each do |backend|
        (1..2).each do |i|
          config.vm.define "be_#{backend}_#{i}".to_sym do |cfg|
            last_ip_octet += 1
            cfg.vm.hostname = "be-#{backend}-#{i}.#{DOMAIN}"
            cfg.vm.network :private_network, :ip => "192.168.33."+last_ip_octet.to_s
            cfg.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef|
              chef.node_name = "be-#{backend}-#{i}"
              chef.add_role "backend_#{backend}"
            end
          end
        end
      end

      config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => "/usr/bin/apt-get update --fix-missing"
      config.vm.define :lb do |cfg|
        last_ip_octet += 1
        lb_ip = "192.168.33."+last_ip_octet.to_s

        cfg.vm.hostname = "lb.#{DOMAIN}"
        cfg.vm.network :private_network, :ip => lb_ip
        cfg.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef|
          chef.node_name = "lb"
          chef.add_role "lb"
        end
      end
    end

This utilizes a few vagrant plugins, vagrant-chef-zero, vagrant-berkshelf, and landrush which are one liners each to install. After that, I can type

    vagrant up  # build my stack from scratch
    vagrant destroy # destroy my stack
    vagrant ssh lb # ssh into the lb instance
    vagrant provision # execute chef (puppet, ansible, bash, etc)

Can you show me equivalent code that fulfills all my requirements using VirtualBox directly and will allow me to change a couple lines to spin this same infrastructure up in AWS or using VMWare?

We're using vagrant and ansible to manage local dev instances with the same ansible scripts responsible for provisioning/deployment to our production boxes. My thought being the less I manage with vagrant, and the more I codify stuff in ansible, the more predictable things are when I go to provision/deploy in production.

I'm thrilled with how vagrant helps the process locally, but at the same time want to do as little as possible in vagrant because it's not applicable/involved when I provision/manage a box @ Linode or Digital Ocean.

Am I under-utilizing vagrant? Or missing a greater benefit by limiting its role?