Found some time to recreate a test environment for various things once and again. The ‘previous version’ used libvirt to control KVM instances with bridged networking. All of this quite well working setup was running on my home ’server’. On my day-to-day work laptop I have been using Virtualbox to quickly test some stuff from time to time. And that’s why Vagrant got my attention.
After a very quick re-install of my old and beloved linux distro Arch Linux (got it booted from the LVM root finally, thank you dracut) it was time to get going.

Installation of Vagrant is a breeze (no distro packages yet, just a gem)
Following the quick start on their site got me going in no time.
I stopped right after getting port forwards in. The next step handled packaging your configured VMs, which Vagrant builds using some base image downloaded somewhere. Getting a base image might already be a bit evil (who knows what ‘base’ means to someone else anyway) , and packaging your configured instance afterwards is just more evil
So I enabled my favourite config management tool (Vagrant had default Chef and Puppet support), added the manifests, and that’s all that’s needed. Next time you ‘vagrant up’ it’ll re-apply it all.

Right now, I’m having a look at Veewee, kind of an ‘addon’ tool to create your own ‘boxes’!