Using Vagrant outside of the "Norm"

Vagrant has come along way with the version 1.0. Now you are freed from the handcuffs of Virtualbox. This is great news to be able to use any type of virtual machine. KVM is a common virtual machine used in production environments and its built in to linux. All it takes is installing a few packages and you can be up and running vagrant with kvm.

There is are a couple things that we need do first.
Install Vagrant's latest version from the download site.

Then install the plugin.

	vagrant plugin install vagrant-kvm
	vagrant plugin list

view raw gistfile1.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Once installed then we need to get a box and convert it for the kvm provider.

	#!/bin/bash
	# get-vagrant-box.sh
	vagrant box add precise64 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box
	pushd ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/precise64/
	cp -R virtualbox/ kvm
	cd kvm
	# copy the Vagrantfile and metadata.json file in this directory
	pwd
	popd

view raw get-vagrant-box.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

{"provider": "kvm"}

view raw metadata.json hosted with ❤ by GitHub

	# Vagrantfile
	Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
	config.vm.box = "precise64"
	config.vm.base_mac = "00163e779fe9"
	config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.2.100"
	end
	# Load include vagrant file if it exists after the auto-generated
	# so it can override any of the settings
	include_vagrantfile = File.expand_path("../include/_Vagrantfile", __FILE__)
	load include_vagrantfile if File.exist?(include_vagrantfile)

view raw Vagrantfile hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Here is a simple Vagrantfile you need to spin up your own KVM vagrant instance.

	Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
	config.vm.box = "precise64"
	end

view raw Vagrantfile hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This is about as easy as it gets.

vagrant up provider=kvm

view raw startup-vagrant-kvm-provider.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The code base for vagrant-kvm is located here. https://github.com/adrahon/vagrant-kvm#quick-start