
Vagrant 1.5 and Vagrant Cloud - geetarista
http://www.vagrantup.com/blog/vagrant-1-5-and-vagrant-cloud.html
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patcon
Mitchell, firstly, I love you. You're an amazing guy, and you're creating
something of great value in the world. I really appreciate you.

OK, so now the constructive criticism: Can you explain the apparent obsession
with bringing everything great into vagrant core? I know that core leverages
the same plugin architecture that everything else does, but I just can't
understand why you privilege "official" plugins above others. Not to mention
the fact the it shifts the burden of maintainership onto core developers such
as yourself.

(This criticism is coming from someone who in the past has spent a long time
working with Drupal, and who has always been disappointed with how that
community insists on pulling everything into core, under the guise of
"shepherding". As I see it, those pieces then move more slowly and are less
likely to see a large maintainer-base who take ownership.)

<3

EDIT: Holy jeez, Vagrant Cloud is awesome.

~~~
mitchellh
Hey Pat! HAHA. Thanks for all the compliments.

As for the criticism: spot on, I can see where this would irk you.

I want to first say that the "core" itself is still very slim: you could
easily generate a Vagrant installation without a lot of these things. The
standard Vagrant distribution, however, is getting more feature packed.

That may be a bit pedantic, so let's talk about the standard Vagrant
distribution. It is getting larger, but the primary reason is because I think
these features are important enough in the "Vagrant vision" to be available
out of the box. Additionally, it shows a bigger promise that I care about the
stability of those things.

The "support" issue is one I am very careful about. Luckily Vagrant core has a
lot more committers and we have a few "lieutenants" that cover specific areas
very well (for example Salt and Ansible provisioners).

As it stands, as the core distribution has grown, I haven't had to spend more
time on issues and I still mostly handle the core code. This is largely in
part to the fantastic community around Vagrant and the core team that is in
place. If I see it shifting otherwise, I'd start to worry.

~~~
patcon
Still wary, but this is good enough for me. If you're not overburdened, then
that's the main thing :) Thanks man

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fideloper
This is really exciting. I'm also glad Vagrant Cloud is in existence, I think
that's exactly what they need.

(I also want to see Docker's Index blown out to be a more robust system like
that!)

SMB is also huge for Windows users. Even on Linux, I found SMB easier to use
and setup than NFS.

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tobych
Thank you sir.

Typo in your blog post: pleasent (should be pleasant). Also: "interetsted" on
the "Organization Accounts" page.

Thank you again.

Not quite the awesome criticism sandwich @patcon made, but that's all I can
do.

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thebyrd
This is hot. Great approach to the same sorts of things we're working on at
[http://bowery.io](http://bowery.io) and a logical next step for vagrant.

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upthedale
One problem with using Windows guests on Vagrant is how big they are. You can
be looking at 20GB for a stripped down disk with just the OS. This can easily
become prohibitive if you want to use more than a few VMs in Vagrant (not to
mention the time copying all this redundant data).

Having read about differencing disks, they seem like the perfect solution to
this problem, by allowing VMs to share the same parent disk, without needing
to copy it (as each VM only needs to keep track of differences to the base
disk). From what I've read of differencing disks, this seems like a no-brainer
for Vagrant (but unfortunately my experience extends no further than what I've
read).

Is there a reason Vagrant doesn't use this approach? Any plans to put this on
the roadmap? It seems like this feature is supported by both VirtualBox and
Hyper-v.

(This page describes differencing disks, and the first diagram under "Using
multiple differencing disks with one parent disk" accurately depicts the sort
of thing I have in mind here [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc720381(v=WS.10)...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc720381\(v=WS.10\).aspx) )

~~~
mitchellh
Differencing disks depend on some things in the core changing. These changes
are under way already in branches of Vagrant and Vagrant 1.6 has a very good
chance of properly using linked clones wherever possible.

~~~
upthedale
Thanks for the super quick reply! I'm glad to hear I'm not completely crazy
with this idea. Multiple 20GB images make my diddy little SSD cry, so this
feature would be fantastic.

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frio
"In 1.6, you'll finally be able to see the status of all created Vagrant
environments from anywhere on your system."

Yay!

~~~
sciurus
This will be nice. In a similar vein, I'd also like to see an option to
install base boxes and plugins system-wide in addition to per-user.

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gianbasagre
Nice work Mitchell! Pretty excited to try this. But...

Is anyone else having problems with this release? On my machine (OSX
Mavericks), running any vagrant command is taking ages and is making my
computer non responsive. I rebooted, reinstalled vagrant, no luck.

I see in Activity Monitor a ruby process is almost taking over my CPU! at
90%+.

~~~
mitchellh
It is probably upgrading your home folder (".vagrant.d") to the new format.
That should be IO-bound though, not CPU-bound. Let it run for awhile... I
haven't heard of this happening.

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noir_lord
Alternatives to NFS on Linux...oh god you just made me a happy happy bunny.

Just read the rsync part, I think I love you guys now.

~~~
moorooboorai
Second the happy bunny part, surely since it's getting close to Easter.

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mikecarlton
Beware of Vagrant 1.5 if you need vagrant-berkshelf. There are serious
dependency issues that are not yet solved:

[https://github.com/berkshelf/vagrant-
berkshelf/issues/141](https://github.com/berkshelf/vagrant-
berkshelf/issues/141)

I had to rollback to 1.4.3

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Legion
Rsync looks awesome, but having to run the rsync-auto command separately looks
like it will be a drag.

There needs to be a plugin that will run rsync-auto automatically on vagrant
up/resume, and terminate it on vagrant halt/suspend.

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stephane-klein
Is it possible to create a private Vagrant Share "proxy" ?

~~~
mitchellh
Yes, it will be. While we intend for the shares through Vagrant Cloud to be
free for personal use, private proxies will cost money when they're available.
But we intend for Vagrant Cloud to be fully self-installable and designed it
that way!

There are always alternate localhost tunneling solutions you can use if you
want a private domain and don't want to pay. But if you want the `vagrant
share` integration and a custom domain, we'll be charging for it.

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iaskwhy
Vagrant Share works flawlessly, thank you very much, Mitchell!

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pwelch
This looks awesome. Really excited about Vagrant Cloud. Wish it had the option
to sign in with Github but still looking forward to it.

Great work Vagrant Community and HashiCorp Team!

~~~
pearkes
Thanks! We look forward to integrating GitHub – there's a ton of cool stuff
that can be done, as it's very common that a box maintainer has Packer
templates, configuration management scripts and so forth there.

We didn't go the OAuth route primarily because we need to enable `vagrant
login` locally, and for that it's useful to have a login/password combination,
authentication tokens. I couldn't think of a workflow that makes this as easy
for a user.

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anko
I don't mean to this sound snarky, and I really appreciate vagrant. I've had
patches merged over the years, so I'm a strong supporter.

BUT, I'd be genuinely interested on the reasoning behind charging for a vmware
provider but not the hyperv one? Is it simply that nobody else bothered to
develop a vmware provider?

I've considered developing a vmware provider, but don't like the idea of
cutting off a vagrant revenue source.

~~~
mitchellh
Hi! I'd be happy to say why. VMware itself costs money, unlike VirtualBox
which is free. We felt it was fair to charge for a provider where the
underlying hypervisor cost money. Additionally, it was our first and only way
to support ourselves in developing this product.

If we had a ton of money we'd make the VMware provider free, too. :) But as it
is, it is our primary source of income at the moment. Based on interest in on-
premise Vagrant Cloud solutions, that may quickly change (hopefully!).

Hyper-V, on the hand, was developed mostly by MS OpenTech. It would be unfair
(and likely illegal) to charge for their work they did and contributed as MIT
licensed code to Vagrant core.

Thanks for your support!

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BerislavLopac
OK, one criticism for Vagrant Cloud: When creating a box, it provides some
default values for name, description etc -- but they are placed into the
plaveholder attribute, meaning I still need to enter my own values. I suggest
putting them to the value attribute of the form fields, which will speed up
things while still allow the users to change the values if they wish.

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rschmitty
Excited for these new sync options like rsync and smb. I had been using smb
shares on my VM in the past to get better performance

~~~
datr
Me too. We gave up trying to get new hires to reliably create smb shares in
the end so have started packaging a smb server with the vm and instead have
them mount the shares in windows. It will be nice to rip all of that out and
replace it with this.

~~~
rschmitty
Hah yes! Exactly what we did

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senthilnayagam
mitchell I admire you, for number of commits you make on github.

downloading it now :)

there was some bad blood earlier where you complained about docker stability,
they skipped vagrant and build boot2docker.

now vagrant has many features which first came out on docker especially in
vagrant cloud.

edit: good to know it is not bad blood, my clarity has improved , curious why
the down vote

~~~
shykes
Hi, Docker maintainer here. I'm not aware of any "bad blood", not everything
has to be a war or a competition ;)

Vagrant has been super useful to help us get a VM up and running with Docker
pre-installed. But when boot2docker came along with a tiny (25MB!) single-
purpose VM, 5 second boot time, way less moving parts and no ruby dependency -
it just made sense to use that instead. It also helped reduce the confusion
between Vagrant and Docker. We had a lot of people who after installing Docker
were confused that now they had to learn this other tool called Vagrant, with
a complicated ruby syntax etc. Taking Vagrant out of the equation helped with
that too.

~~~
mitchellh
I agree. There was definitely no bad blood! I was frustrated with dockers
stability at one point and made my feelings public. Perhaps I shouldn't have
but I also remember saying at the same time that docker is a fantastic idea :)
so... not bad blood. Boot2docker has also been great for the ecosystem so it's
all good.

~~~
shykes
By the way Mitchell I think we fixed most of your bug reports - thanks and
please keep them coming!

~~~
senthilnayagam
I love open source

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taternuts
Can't wait to give it a shot, the Vagrant Share feature is really cool.

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dflock
Anyone know why there's no repository for Vagrant? I have to manually download
and install the deb|rpm and install it myself, manually, on every new release.

Is this just a manpower thing?

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jwcrux
Does anyone know what terminal emulator they're using for vagrantcloud.com? It
looks slick, I just can't identify it.

~~~
steveklabnik
They're serving up one big JS file:
[https://d250n10lsq5j8r.cloudfront.net/assets/application-
aca...](https://d250n10lsq5j8r.cloudfront.net/assets/application-
acabf0ff19fad8ad3d4f2dee89cf438b.js)

control-f-ing for 'term' makes it look like it may even just be custom?
[https://github.com/search?q=var+AddTerminalShell&ref=reposea...](https://github.com/search?q=var+AddTerminalShell&ref=reposearch&type=Code)

~~~
jwcrux
That's what I was thinking.. Found the JS file, Googled for AddTerminalShell
to no avail. Didn't know if anyone else could recognize it or if it was
custom.

Thanks for the help, though!

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alex_zige
Vagrant cloud looks awesome. nice and easy share boxes distributions. Good
work!

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wnevets
is 1.5 not compatible with 1.4.3 boxes? I had to downgrade because of ruby
errors on windows 7.

~~~
mitchellh
Its completely compatible, and I run Vagrant 1.5 on Windows! What error did
you get? Please report it:
[https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues](https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues)

