Managing and provisioning VMs
Automation is the key ingredient for efficiency in any system administration strategy. If your job involves spinning virtual machines (VMs) regularly, you should familiarize yourself with Vagrant [1], which helps you make consistent virtual environments available to your users with a few keystrokes. Vagrant provides a simple and easy to use command-line interface (CLI) that helps automate the creation, editing, running, and deletion of VMs. Moreover, it supports all major virtual platforms, such as VirtualBox and VMware, and plays nicely with all the well-known software configuration tools, such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Fabric, and more.
Since VM hypervisors like VirtualBox and VMware have their own CLIs that can be used to automate provisioning, why should you choose Vagrant? Vagrant offers consistency and interoperability. With Vagrant you can define your virtual environment in code and then use it to provision VMs on top of any hypervisor running on any operating system. Additionally, anytime you make changes to the virtual environment, instead of sharing the complete VM that can be worth several gigabytes, you can share a simple text file that can then be used to provision VMs with the changes.
A Rolling Start
While Vagrant can provision VMs with various virtualization software, by default it uses the free and open source VirtualBox.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
LibreOffice Tested as Possible Office 365 Alternative
Another major organization has decided to test the possibility of migrating from Microsoft's Office 365 to LibreOffice.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.