Why Use Vagrant and Virtualbox?īuilding a software prototyping environment (aka lab) is far simpler than ever before. In summary, this is a time-saving tool for standing up VMs faster, configuring them, adding packages to VMs, or integrating your virtual platforms with tools like Ansible. It allows for some fundamental integration and automation with platforms like VirtualBox, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, etc. Vagrantis a time-saving open source ( MIT) tool from our friends at HashiCorp. For advanced users, it also has some command line, advanced networking capabilities, and integrates nicely with Vagrant. Your virtual machines will be hosted in this on top of your base OS, sharing its resources. VirtualBoxis an open source ( GPL v2) virtualization platform that works on almost any base OS.

In this blog, we give an overview of VirtualBox and Vagrant, how they can combine to form a virtual prototyping environment, and instructions for setting up your first lab. But if you use Vagrant and VirtualBox, you can virtualize and save time. Virtualization can be time-consuming, especially in open source.

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