Wednesday, April 01, 2015

Virtual Machine setup for development purposes


Creating a Virtual machine with Vagrant and PuPHeT.


According to those 2013 stack overflow questions, there were many reasons not to develop in a VM, unless one had to specifically develop for several OS:
But in the same year, the PhPHet developer explained why he thinks that one has to develop in a virtual machine.

Running a VM 

I followed the vagrant instructions to install a basic VM.
vagrant init hashicorp/precise32 vagrant up
"The guest machine entered an invalid state while waiting for it
to boot. " [...] "If the provider you're using has a GUI that comes with it, it is often helpful to open that and watch the machine"
I started the virtual machine in virtual box, an error message came up: 
"VT-x is disabled in the BIOS. (VERR_VMX_MSR_VMXON_DISABLED)."
Under Machine / Settings/ System / Acceleration, I disabled the Hardware virtualisation. The VM could then start. This works for 32 bits systems. Unfortunately 64 bit systems require hardware virtualisation, this means I cannot change this setting for 64 systems. I'll have to enable VT-x in the BIOS later on.

After I installed Virtual box, my mouse was rendered invisible. This may be due to the fact that the mouse was captured and that I didn't know the host capture key (default to the right Ctrl key) to free the mouse from the virtual machine's window.

Connecting to the virtual machine

Connecting from the virtual box GUI. The default user is "vagrant" and password "vagrant".

Connecting with SSH into the machine from a command prompt:
 vagrant ssh

 

Shared folder

A folder can be share with the host operating system. In virtual Box settings for the machine, under shared folder, create a machine folder and set it to auto-mount in the guest operating system.

Other tools



Messages by the vagrant creator

Tao of hashicorp
Comparing Filesystem Performance in Virtual Machines Automation Obsessed

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