This article is a short introduction to Packer and Vagrant - tools that we often recommend to our customers but which may be a bit hard to understand if you have no previous expose to them. Packer Packer is used to “create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration”. Packer works […]
Vagrant has built-in support for connecting to Windows VMs using the vagrant rdp command. It does basically does the same as vagrant ssh for Linux VMs. There are a few shortcomings, though: vagrant rdp fails to automatically accept the host key of the VM it is connecting to, at least when using it from Linux […]
This was a revelation that came to me when fixing Vagrant on my Fedora 34 laptop: Vagrant plugins seem to be just Ruby gems installed into an isolated runtime environment, with "vagrant plugin" ensuring that the gems are installed in the correct place. The same gems that you can install with "vagrant plugiin install" can […]
We use Vagrant and Virtualbox a lot because it is an excellent tool for infrastructure code development. Unfortunately it is also very prone to breakage during operating system upgrades, especially if you depend on many plugins. When I upgraded from Fedora 32 to 34 Vagrant broken even more than usual due to conflicting rspec dependencies. […]
Puppet Litmus allows creating SUTs ("System Under Test") with Vagrant using Virtualbox or Hyper-V as the virtualization backend. However, the default virtual machine settings like 1024MB of memory are only suitable for very simple modules and applications. For example, Litmus testing our puppetmaster-installer will fail with the default settings. Litmus documentation tells us that you […]
This posting comes strictly from the land of esoteria. We have a Vagrant + Virtualbox environment that sets up Foreman used for PXE booting baremetal servers. The environment work fine on Linux and MacOS. But we needed to make this environment work also on Windows. Easy, right? Vagrant and Virtualbox are supposed to abstract all […]
We're using the centos/7 base box in Vagrant a lot and often hit this problem when bringing up new VMs with Vagrant: This error comes from vagrant-vbguest plugin which tried to install the Virtualbox Guest Additions but failed. The error message is misleading, because the real issue is related to upstream (CentOS) yum repositories. As […]
We use Vagrant and Virtualbox heavily when developing Puppet code. We also do provisioning of baremetal servers with Foreman. While Vagrant is a really powerful tool, it is not designed for creating VMs that boot from the network (PXE boot). Fortunately Virtualbox itself provides a rich command-line with which you can create and configure virtual […]
Vagrant on näppärä väline myös Windows-virtuaalikoneiden luontiin esim. Puppet-resurssien testauksessa. Windows-virtuaalikoneille on luontevaa käyttää Powershell-provisiointia, minkä Vagrant tekee melkoisen yksinkertaiseksi. Aika nopeasti ilmenee tarve välittää Powershell-skriptille parametrejä Vagrantin kautta. Tästä on hieman hankalaa löytää esimerkkejä, joten tässä yksi. Oletetaan että meillä on Powershell-skripti nimeltä bootstrap_windows.ps1 Vagrant-projektin alihakemistossa 'provision'. Skripti asentaa ja konfiguroi Puppet-agentin Windows-virtuaalikoneelle. Skriptille […]
