Tagged “vagrant”
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OmniOS and Vagrant
<3 ZFS
I've recently gotten religion about ZFS, and as a result, I've been looking hard at the various systems that offer you the ability to use ZFS and other amazing tools from the Solaris lineage (now being developed freely under the Illumos moniker after Oracle's unceremonious murder of OpenSolaris.)
My data's backed up on an 8 TB FreeNAS, but there's also an amazing trend of Illumos-based distributions on offer that offer KVM virtualization, which was ported to Illumos by Joyent for their SmartOS distribution. Theo Schlossnagle recently gave a talk at the NYC DevOps meetup about their Illumos-based OmniOS distribution. OmniOS is a bit more than a JeOS - it aims to provide just enough packaged software to let you build the Illumos kernel and several other important tools like tmux and screen, and then get out of your way. Like SmartOS, it provides both lightweight zones-based virtualization and KVM for full hardware virtualization, but OmniOS is designed to be permanently installed on a machine, as opposed to SmartOS's focus on USB or PXE booting and ephemeral global zone configuration.
OmniTI also makes a larger set of packages that their Managed Services team uses at http://pkg.omniti.com/omniti-ms/en/index.shtml.
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Vagrant and NFS
One of the most useful features of Vagrant is that it has the ability to share files with the VMs it manages, which lets your team work with the tools they're used to while still getting the benefits of running the full production stack.It can share those files from the host (the machine running VirtualBox and Vagrant) to the guest (the virtualized Linux machine) via VirtualBox's built-in file sharing on Mac, Windows, or Linux. When run on Linux or Mac hosts, it can also share files to the guest via NFS. NFS performs much better for sharing large numbers of files on a Linux or Mac host, which is well documented in the excellent Vagrant documentation. In addition, remember that the directory with the Vagrantfile in it will be shared with VirtualBox's built-in file sharing, so we probably don't want to put our docroot right in that directory.
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End "Works on My Machine" Surprises with Vagrant
How many times have the following issues happened on a project you've worked on?
- Notices (or worse) appeared on production because of a PHP version mismatch between a developer's machine and the production web servers.
- A new PHP extension or PECL extension had to be installed on production because it was installed in WAMP or MAMP?
- A team member ran into difficult setting up their local environment and spent many hours stuck on something.
- Team members didn't set up SSL or Varnish on their local machines and issues had to be caught on a dev server.
- A team member would like to switch to Homebrew, but can't set aside the many hours to redo their setup until a project is done.
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Ensuring your Vagrant's box is weatherproof: A quick Veewee tip
We'll be doing a screencast series soon on using the Vagrant gem to distribute and manage virtual machines so that your entire team (yes, even Windows folks!) can do development on their local machine with the same software that's on your production Linux servers.Another useful tool in the Vagrant user's arsenal is Veewee. Veewee lets you automate the VirtualBox application to install a full operating system with just the packages you want and need. Veewee does have some built-in validation tools, such as
vagrant basebox validate BOXNAME, which will run a set of Cucumber acceptance tests to ensure that the virtual machine should work properly when brought up with Vagrant, as well as with the Chef and Puppet configuration management tools. -
CentOS 6 and VirtualBox (VBoxHeadless CPU Usage Fix)
TL;DR: Add "noapic" to your kernel line if your VBoxHeadless process uses far too much CPU.
I've been working on making space-efficient CentOS 5.6 and 6 images for VirtualBox recently. I'm building the images as part of a pilot program to start using the Vagrant gem to allow our developers to test the Drupal code they write on the real production OS before pushing it to the dev server. (I'm also learning Puppet, both for this project and as a way to more easily re-use tested configurations as we launch new sites.)
The CentOS 5.6 images I made worked like a charm, but ran into a problem wherein the VBoxHeadless process that hosted my CentOS 6 image would always use 25% CPU on my MacBook Air (one full core) despite the guest OS showing between 98% and 100% idle.
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