Automation with VirtualBox, Vagrant & Chef

In this article, we’re testing Chef to automated deploying virtual machines (vm)s using:

• Chef Zero –> infrastructure code, developing in local mode.
  Follow default prompts, and download from https://www.chef.io/downloads/tools/workstation the application is open-source that provides template deployment for OS.

• Vagrant –> VM template manager.
  Follow default prompts, and download from https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads the application allows you to deploy VMs using CLI in a consistent manner By default vagrant box images are stored in the ./vagrant directory

• VirtualBox –> software hypervisor.
  Follow default prompts, download from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads is a software-defined hypervisor for creating virtual machines.

Prepping the compute element

1. If using Windows operating system, disable Hyper-V

Disable Hyper-V with PowerShell, having different hypervisor software installed will cause issues.

    Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V-All

2. Test vagrant application functionality

On a linux instance run sudo /sbin/vboxconfig from the command line an ensure all checks are cleared.

1. Testing Vagrant Application
   • Run vagrant commands to ensure the application is installed correctly.
2. Start/Initialize the Project
   • Navigate to the project folder and initialize a vagrant config file vagrant.exe init hashicorp bionic64 note bionic64 is a maintained custom image of Ubuntu by hashicorp.
3. Start the vagrant VM installation
   • Run vagrant.exe up this will initiate the build process, it will look for the vagrant version of ubuntu if not available it will download from the Vagrant Cloud https://app.vagrantup.com/ubuntu/boxes/bionic64
4. Destroy the vagrant instance
   • Run vagrant.exe destroy this will destroy the vagrant vm instance.

Testing VM Automation with Chef Zero

1. Create a Chef project folder

• I recommend creating the subfolder within the same project directory for easy management/reference. It can get confusing as the build progress with new files and folders. Hence take the time to plan out the folder structure for the project.

    mkdir /home/userA/Desktop/chef_myproj
  

2. Initialize a Chef cookbook (a.k.a template)

• Navigate to the project folder and use chef generate cookbook

  cd /home/userA/Desktop/chef_myproj
  chef generate cookbook chef_myproj_cookbook
  

Tip chef_myproj_cookbook is the subfolder where all the configuration files for Chef will be saved in.

3. Test build using kitchen cli

• Run kitchen list to test deployable vagrant vm instances.

Note: Code deployment for Ubuntu64, requires an internet connection to download the packages & it’s dependencies.