Deploying Vagrant Boxes to Physical Machines?

[Albertopotomas]

Forgive me if this has been discussed before, and I have a hard time imagining it has not, but I had difficulty finding any information about it.

I understand that Vagrant is a VM configuration and provisioning tool, but I would like to be able to deploy in the same way to physical machines. 

I see how the Vagrant boxes transfer easily to cloud providers like AWS, but what if I want to deploy in the same way to a physical workstation? The workstations are for high-end 3D graphics and animation, so they can't be running in a VM.

Vagrant seems to be the perfect tool for provisioning our servers, which run in VM's anyway, but then we have all these workstations that I would like to handle in the same way. I'm aware of tools like Puppet and Chef, but I was hoping this was somehow possible without bringing another guest to the party.

I'm also aware that we could just install the base OS on each workstation and then run shell scripts on all the boxes remotely, but I was hoping for some kind of magical solution where we could install the OS over the network using the same configs tested locally with Vagrant.

I know this is kind of crazy, but I'm hoping someone has been in this same situation and could at least provide some guidance as to the best route to go. Should I abandon any hope of using Vagrant for anything that needs to be deployed to a physical box? Is my dream just an impossible fantasy? What would you do?

Thank you.

[Torben Knerr]

This might be useful for you:

https://github.com/tknerr/vagrant-managed-servers

It does not set up the OS for you, but given the OS is already installed and you have SSH access you can use this plugin to provision physical machines where there is no VM lifecycle to control.

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[Diego Zamboni]

I don't think Vagrant has the capability of installing the OS on a machine. With VMs, Vagrant assumes the VMs come already preinstalled with the OS. With a physical machine, you'd need to have it already with the OS preinstalled as well, and in a form that is accessible to Vagrant (ssh keys, etc.). For the internal configuration of the machine, Vagrant mostly farms it out to CFEngine, Chef or Puppet anyway. I would personally recommend CFEngine, but I'm biased :)

--Diego

[Patrick Debois]

My vagrant 'cloud' clone - mccloud - https://github.com/jedi4ever/mccloud has a hosts mode.

It does not use the create & destroy , but it follows the same provision, bootstrap mode for physicial machines.
I find it useful to manage physical hosts,

[Albertopotomas]

I knew that automating the OS installs was asking for too much, but something like this custom provider seems to be a good compromise. Thank you so much for your help.

[Albertopotomas]

Thank you for the recommendation. I will be sure to check it out!