Can vagrant start multiple VMs in parallel?

[Yiliang Bao]

Hi,

I am using vagrant to start many VMs for a test setup. Currently I am using virtualbox, and it takes about 25 seconds to start a VM. It takes about 8 seconds for Ubuntu server guest to boot, but there is some other overhead. 

Since I may need to start many VMs, I am wondering if there is anything I can do to speed it up. For example, is it possible to start VMs in parallel. I do not mind to switch to other virtualization platform, like VMware, if the virtualization platform is the limitation. 

Thanks,

Yiliang

[Sebastian Otaegui]

If you used docker it would probably be much faster, but is not virtualization.

Do you need a virtualization environment?

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[Yiliang Bao]

Hi Sebastian,

Thanks for the quick help. Are you referring to the latest support of Docker inside vagrant? I will take a look at Docker anyways. 

I do not understand what "virtualization environment" means in your email. I assume you are not talking about the virtualization provided by virtualbox or VMware, since that is what I using now.

Thanks again!
Yiliang

[Sebastian Otaegui]

What I mean is that vmware and virtual box differ from docker/lxc in that vmware and virtual box virtualize hardware (create a software emulation of the hardware) while docker is a container.

In Vmware and Virtualbox your guest os boots as if it was a machine while on docker the kernel is already instantiated and docker/lxc create an isolated compartment within, that is, there is no "real" boot process in docker.

But I do not know what you are trying to do.

Regards

[Yiliang Bao]

What I try to do is to create a virtual cluster with 4 nodes in one physical machine. Currently each node is a virtualbox VM. The cluster may be scaled to include many more nodes later. 

With the configuration file I have (part of Vagrantfile is shown below), VMs are started sequentially. It takes a lot of time to start the complete cluster, since every VM goes through a boot process as you pointed out. I am wondering if there is any way to speed it up. I figure one possible solution is that VMs are started in parallel.

  (1..4).each do |i|

    config.vm.define "node-#{i}" do |node|

      node.vm.box = "base-node"

      node.vm.provider :virtualbox do |v|

        v.name = "node-#{i}"

        v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "640"]

      end

    end

  end

The main reason that I use virtualbox is I know virtualbox better and it works well with vagrant. Going with a container is definitely an option. I will look into this if I cannot make the current setup (based on virtualbox) faster.

Thanks for the help.