
Vagrant 1.8 released - mafro
https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/vagrant-1-8.html
======
mstade
It's unfortunate that they announced Otto as the "successor to Vagrant" when
in reality it seems Vagrant and Otto solve different, albeit related problems.
Otto seems like it's solving the high level issues, to introduce a sort of
hive-mind conformity; whereas Vagrant solves the issue of efficiently
automating the creation of specific environments. It makes sense then that
Otto uses Vagrant to achieve it's goal, but it's a bit confusing to call it a
"successor" then. Vagrant is a great piece of tooling, and it's good to see
that it lives on despite confusing messaging.

Just reading this announcement, it seems 1.8 is an amazing release. The linked
clones by the sounds of it seems like it'll solve on of the major issues I've
had with Vagrant. Additionally, this little nugget is hidden under minor
features, but should really have a heading of its own:

> Vagrant now automatically installs VirtualBox for a smoother getting started
> experience on Mac OS X and Windows.

Awesome, kudos!

~~~
chrisan
> Vagrant now automatically installs VirtualBox for a smoother getting started
> experience on Mac OS X and Windows.

Anyone know if it does this when VMWare is already installed?

~~~
dugmartin
This is a dumb default for Windows users that use Hyper-V (like I do). You
can't run Hyper-V and Virtualbox at the same time.

~~~
stephenr
This is a dumb default for anyone on any platform that has a virtualisation
tool already installed.

But then again, this is the person/organisation that defaults to a bash login
shell during provisioningg (which in turn causes the famous "stdin: is not a
tty" warning/error), just to avoid having to source some files in their
default base box.

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chrisan
For Windows users 1.8 brings Ansible support by running it on the local VM:
[https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/provisioning/ansible_local.htm...](https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/provisioning/ansible_local.html)

Previously you could do this with cygwin and some hacking but looking forward
to trying this way out instead

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dblooman
They really need to make the VMware integration free. Hard to consider paying
when something like docker-compose works well.

~~~
merb
the problem isn't that vmware integration isn't free. The problem is more that
every vmware fusion/workstation upgrade costs a new vagrant license swell,
that makes this combination expensive.

~~~
lstamour
Yep. Nailed it. I think I've bought 3 upgrades already...

------
jarpineh
Getting vm clone and local ansible configured took some time, but now
provisioning seems to work quite fast. Great!

I'd like to find a way to get Ubuntu to boot faster and Vagrant waiting
unnecessarily long for the machine to become available. Judging by VirtualBox
console, Vagrant could notice machine readiness a few seconds faster. Also,
for a virtual environment 10 secs or more for startup seems a little
excessive.

Though this bit is not necessary Vagrant specific...

Looking forward to using the new snapshot functionality to test my Ansible
scripts in isolation.

Also, looking through these bits I found this:
[https://gist.github.com/juanje/3797297](https://gist.github.com/juanje/3797297)

I noticed that for repeatedly installing same packages, like when debugging
provisioning, using apt cache on host machine's synced folder speeds up the
process immensely.

~~~
TheGuyWhoCodes
Might want to use [https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-
cachier](https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-cachier) instead of that gist

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sciurus
The new built-in snapshot support looks nice. You could do snapshot/rollback
already with
[https://github.com/jedi4ever/sahara](https://github.com/jedi4ever/sahara) ,
but that only supported one level of snapshots, whereas this supports many.

~~~
chrislaco
[https://github.com/dergachev/vagrant-vbox-
snapshot/](https://github.com/dergachev/vagrant-vbox-snapshot/)

------
trymas
> `vagrant up` times will be much faster and the amount of disk space used
> will be significantly reduced. As an anecdotal measure, a small Linux box on
> my machine went from a 10 second import to less than second. And a Windows
> box (typically very large) went from a 40 second import also to less than a
> second.

I tried this, but it does not seem faster to me. All my projects set up on
vagrant from halted state (`vagrant halt`) to up (`vagrant up`) take same
amount of time as it was with `vagrant 1.7`.

Or I am doing/understand this wrong?

~~~
mitchellh
"SudoAlex" adjacent has the correct answer. We'll make it default at some
point in 1.8.x. We decided last minute to remove the default so that any bugs
that are found can be flushed out. So far, none on this feature. But yeah, you
have to enable it.

After you enable it, you'll have to `vagrant destroy` before you see the
benefits though. Linked clones are from scratch.

~~~
phamilton
The announcement is a bit misleading then:

> Linked cloning will happen automatically if your system supports it.
> Providers other than VirtualBox and VMware can be updated outside of Vagrant
> to support linked cloning automatically.

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netcraft
How does vagrant work with the licensing of windows guests? Do you have to use
a technet iso or something like that?

~~~
spdionis
I know you can find many bundles on microsoft.com with vagrant file and box
ready for you. It's for testing on various versions of Internet Explorer but I
guess you can use it for whatever you want.

~~~
rimantas
[http://modern.ie/](http://modern.ie/) — it has a link to VMs.

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mrfusion
For someone who doesn't know a lot about this why use vagrant over docker?

~~~
n0us
Vagrant is a way of setting up virtual machines. For example I am not using
docker (yet, it's in progress) but I use Vagrant on my Mac to run an Ubuntu vm
for my dev environment. I even use it on my Ubuntu desktop which is running a
different version of Ubuntu. I don't have to pollute my mac by installing a
bunch of stuff and I get to work in an environment that is more or less
identical to my deployment server. You don't use Vagrant for deployment, its
just a tool for making sure that everyone on the team is using the same
environment. Vagrant just makes it very easy to set up because you have a
"Vagrant file" that gets checked into the repo which will automatically set up
the vm using shell scripts, Puppet, Chef, etc.

Docker on the other hand is a tool that assists in isolating Linux processes.
You might have many VMs running in a private cloud and process isolation makes
it simpler and easier to more efficiently utilize computing resources.

------
timetraveller
Didn't they say Vagrant got replaced by otto?

~~~
matchu
Otto replaces Vagrant _for the common use case_ : if you're just a person who
wants to run a personal dev server, they'd like you to move onto Otto.

However, Otto is just a layer on top of Vagrant that automates a lot of the
decisions that a dev would usually make. Vagrant is still relevant for other
use cases, so they'll continue to develop it as a standalone product, too.

