VMWare VDI / Vagrant

[Mohan Radhakrishnan]

Hi,

        I am trying to provision a set of development tools using Vagrant on VMWare VDI's. The development tools comprise IDE's , JDK, NodeJS and similar tools. Do others here use this setup ? Could you share any views ?

Thanks,

Mohan

[dragon788]

You will probably want to use Packer to build out a base image and push it into your VMware infrastructure, then you can possibly configure access to the VMs via Vagrant with a vSphere connection, but as far as I'm aware the Vagrant VMware plugin is ONLY for use with the "desktop" line of products, ie Workstation/Fusion/Player Pro.

[Mohan Radhakrishnan]

Thanks.

I have a setup described here (https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/introducing-the-vagrant-vmware-desktop-plugin/ )on my desktop.

This is obviously what you meant my 'desktop' line of products ?? And the procedure you described ia a VMWare/Vagrant VDI.that remote users can  access.  I think  that is what is currently not supported ?

So if that is not supported then I think the VMWare VDI's ( without Vagrant ) can have tools provisioned.

Mohan

[dragon788]

Yup, you understood it correctly. Vagrant is essentially a tool used to start/stop VMs and do light provisioning, and there is a plugin that allows this to interact with vSphere, but it would be more of an "exclusive" desktop per user rather than any kind of shared desktop. This plugin might do what you are wanting by allowing a user to spin up a VM from a template using `vagrant up`.

https://github.com/nsidc/vagrant-vsphere

As far as getting software installed to create a standard base image that the users start from, you can build VMware VMs locally or on vSphere using the vmware-iso or vsphere-iso plugins, and both of these are now maintained by Hashicorp.

https://medium.com/@gmusumeci/deploying-vmware-vsphere-virtual-machines-with-packer-terraform-d0211f72b7f5