VMware vs Virtualbox

[sanub]

Hi,

I have just now joined this group and have come across Vagrant only recently and out of my intrigue and interest i have spent some amount time to understand its capabilities and usecases for myself. I have a question in relation to hosting Vagrant, side effects and performance from a baremetals perspective. This is my current situation:

- Possessing a Dell poweredge R710 with 2 cpu's and 6 cores each (total 12 cores) + 48GB RAM + 4 x 10kSAS disks (total of 992GB HDD) +iDRAC 6i + RAID0

- Installed VMWare ESXi 6.7 on a 32GB USB drive to boot stright into esxi. I use the web interface to log into esxi console and launch two Ubuntu 18.04 server VM's and undertake any admin related activities. The ip is static and vmware tools installed. I do not have any other VMware products, installed.

My question:

1. VMWare: I came across josenk's approach to installing Vagrant on to the ESXi (https://github.com/josenk/vagrant-vmware-esxi) but am not sure if this is sure fire approach as it has an elaborate set of steps to take. I could not find any other alternatives to install Vagrant and I am currently not willing to invest in Vagrant+VMware paid license as i am unsure if it would be compatible with my infrastructure (not gone there, yet!). Do you know if there are any other easier alternative approach to installation on ESXi 6.7?

2. VirtualBox: I could not find an approach to installing VB on baremetals in a similar approach as to ESXi. I need to have an OS and then install VB on top. This causes a predicament as in there are additional layers of OS/hypervisor/OS to process requests and this could impact performance which i am trying to minimise. If this is the easiest approach and offers better reliability and stability, i would be interested in this approach (would do it on top of Ubuntu 20.04).

Looking at these two options, what would the Vagrant expert recommend. I am somehow begining to buy into the benefits of Vagrant.

Thank you and looking ahead to reading your response.

Cheers,

Sanub

[JP Toto]

Sanub,

An important distinction is that I don't think Jonathan is installing Vagrant onto the ESXi host, he's running it from his desktop. (Vagrant is generally run from a desktop and used to create and orchestrate local virtual machines) 

The extra setup is so you can get VMWare ESXi to accept the commands from Vagrant on your desktop machine. It looks like Jonathan's repo is pretty robust. If you can get the setup working it would be worth being able to build infra using Vagrant code files.

Alternatively, you can use Packer to create VMs directly on free ESXi as described in this post. https://nickcharlton.net/posts/using-packer-esxi-6.html That also requires some setup directly on VMWare ahead of time.

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JP Toto   |   james....@gmail.com   |   http://jptoto.jp   |   @jptoto

[Jim McGinness]

I've used josenk/vagrant-vmware-esxi with moderate success. There's an obligate password interaction needed for a deploy that makes it more awkward than some other providers, but it generally works the way it's supposed to and I've tried it with something like a dozen different boxes (Linux host, ESXI 6.7 target). Virtualbox is not designed for standalone baremetal installation (so far as I know), so it's not a good comparison.

If you want absolute highest performance, of course, you don't want any layers of VM or hypervisor, but for ordinary work the performance losses are usually small and acceptable. The strength of Vagrant is to be able to do quick, repeatable installs of a particular VM environment and the requirements on Vagrant boxes to work as Vagrant boxes mean a few compromises on security and configuration. My understanding is that most people use Vagrant as a way to bring up disposable test environments, not as a way to deploy production machines (for which there are recommended, better alternatives, such as Terraform, among others).

(My server is much more modest than yours; it's a Dell R210-II with just one quad processor and 16GB but as a home server, it works for my small experiments and is quiet enough except when the fans go all out for a minute or so every couple of months when a new cert is being deployed to the iDRAC.)

 -- jmcg

[sanub]

Thank you all for your kind responses.

[kathir]

Hi

I have a clarification 

I have installed jenkins, enabled and started and status is showing as running in my vagrant machine

I need to use Jenkins to automate my script and vagrant file to provision

Please find the attached script, and let me know why i am not able to use commands like vagrant up and vagrant ssh .

Thanks & Regards,

Kathirvel G

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