I don't know whether this is possible but would like to give it a go and see if someone knows something about it.
I work with applications that fix phones and sometime it happens that driver of one application can conflict with another.
I was wondering if is possible to create multiple virtual machines (lightweight) that can host a single software and just drivers related to it so I can isolate the environment from other software.
Let's say I want to create one virtual machine that when I turn on, it will only open a samsung app,it will have it's own drivers, dedicated small space and device connection ability.
I want to do this with multiple software.
I heard of virtual machines like virtual box but thought they are too heavy for running a single app.
How about docker or something similar? can they work for this purpose?
NOTE: I want to run software that run on win 7 only.
Thanks
Docker runs only on Linux; you will need sort of "full virtualization" software to run it on Windows!
I know of several VM software for Windows, but all of them are rather heavy for running a single app. Also, I think you need separate Windows license for each "guest" ("child") Windows installation.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-best-and-cheapest-ways-to-get-windows-and-linux-for-virtual-machines/
So in our project i see we need to create virtual machines for test purposes. These machines need to be installed with latest versions of software such as browsers(chrom,firefox), adobe flash player, java runtime etc
Since this is a repetitive job i was wondering if the downloading can be automated.
I am wondering if i need to write a web crawler kind of script to do that or are there easily available alternatives?
Is there an established way to take a Vagrant box and use it as the operating system for a "bare metal" machine, i.e. a normal computer and not a hypervisor, without having to sit through an installation process?
Now I understand the common response will probably be "install an OS regularly and then use a proper configuration management tool like Puppet or Chef" but hear me out. Our IT organization would like to create a base Vagrant box with all security-related protocols and applications enforced. Then a configuration management tool like Puppet could install "useful" applications like databases and web servers on top of it.
This works best when a software developer wants to deploy a new utility to development environments or servers - they can write the Puppet code to install exactly what they want, which can be turned over to IT to run it on top of the validated Vagrant box to create a virtual machine server.
By hosting the Vagrant box internally, we can hide the security details from the developer while they write new Puppet code, they can test their Puppet code on the same environment they will run it on, and it will provision much faster during testing since the box is just downloaded once. Most "production" deployments will stay as Virtual Machines.
In rare circumstances, we may want a real, bare-metal server, not a VM, probably when we get new hardware to run more VMs or if the utility we need is very computationally intensive. It would be nice if the existing Vagrant box could be repurposed so bare-metal and virtual servers were indistinguishable.
EDIT: I found a post on askubuntu (https://askubuntu.com/questions/32499/migrate-from-a-virtual-machine-vm-to-a-physical-system) which seems to do what I want, can anyone verify if such a procedure would work on a Vagrant disk image, if there would be necessary cleanup (like Vagrant ssh keys) or if it could be generalized to non-Ubuntu operating systems (since it uses Live CD)?
A Vagrant box packaged for VirtualBox is essentially a virtual disk with metadata. Most likely it's going to have the VirtualBox tools and drivers installed, which won't do much good on a physical system. Not only that, the drivers for the physical system would need to be installed on the box image.
What you're talking about doing is a good use case for some sort of "ghosting" software that simply copies blocks of data to a physical disk. There's really no advantage to using Vagrant here that I can see.
I've been reading about Vagrant, and I find it quite useful for my development. I am currently managing a series of services (mail, web, LDAP, file sharing, etc.), and often one of these falls and needs a quick backup. Is it possible (and recommended) to use Vagrant for these purposes?
So far I've virtual machines installed like real machines.
I would also like to know about an alternative to Vagrant which would allow me to setup a simple configuration file and put a virtual machine, for example, with Zimbra, and quickly have an alternate mail server, enable RabbitMQ, etc.
Vagrant should be used more like a staging environment to test your infrastructure changes. It should be your test bed for automated infrastructure changes.
The way we use it at my company is like so:
Create VMs for our managed servers in Vagrant.
Create puppet definitions for each server.
Create cucumber tests for each server.
Make infrastructure changes via puppet and add cucumber tests.
Launch our servers to test for failures.
Fix bugs, release and/or back to step 4.
Basically when we're happy with our changes, we'll pull our puppet changes into production to make it happen.
I'd not recommend using vagrant to manage VMs for real production. I'd use something else like razor, virsh, OpenStack or one of the many other vm management systems out there.
This page suggests that the Vagrant push command is meant for deploying to production:
https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/vagrant-push-one-command-to-deploy-any-application/
"Additionally, multiple config.push.define declarations can be in a Vagrantfile to define multiple pushes, perhaps one to staging and one to production, for example."
From my experience, Vagrant mainly used in a development environment.
Vagrant configuration and provisioning options are limited compared to Terraform for example.
If you are working on a cloud based environment, you can use Terraform for infrastructure provisioning.
If your environment is local or your VMs will be hosted on a datacenter, you can use Ansible, chef or puppet for you configuration management and automation.
Hashicorp just published Otto, which is meant to be the Vagrant's successor. It is designed to support deployment environments.
From their Github page:
The key features of Otto are:
Automatic development environments: Otto detects your application
type and builds a development environment tailored specifically for that
application, with zero or minimal configuration. If your application depends
on other services (such as a database), it'll automatically configure and
start those services in your development environment for you.
Built for Microservices: Otto understands dependencies and versioning
and can automatically deploy and configure an application and all
of its dependencies for any environment. An application only needs to
tell Otto its immediate dependencies; dependencies of dependencies are
automatically detected and configured.
Deployment: Otto knows how to deploy applications as well develop
them. Whether your application is a modern microservice, a legacy
monolith, or something in between, Otto can deploy your application to any
environment.
Docker: Otto can use Docker to download and start dependencies
for development to simplify microservices. Applications can be containerized
automatically to make deployments easier without changing the developer
workflow.
Production-hardened tooling: Otto uses production-hardened tooling to
build development environments (Vagrant),
launch servers (Terraform), configure
services (Consul), and more. Otto builds on
tools that powers the world's largest websites.
Otto automatically installs and manages all of this tooling, so you don't
have to.
I had the same question and have been investigating the use of Vagrant push which as per their documentation, as of version 1.7, Vagrant is capable of deploying or "pushing" application code in the same directory as your Vagrantfile to a remote such as an FTP server.
I'm considering having vagrant spin up in a VM for developers, while also giving you the option to deploy your code to a live server for production environments.
As mentioned by #andrerpena, Otto is the successor of Vagrant.
From www.ottoproject.io :
Otto can deploy your application. Users of Vagrant for years have wanted a way to deploy their Vagrant environments to production. Unfortunately, the Vagrantfile doesn't contain enough information to build a proper production environment with industry best practices. An Appfile is made to encode this knowledge, and deployment is a single command away.
What I would like to do is create a clean virtual machine image as the output of a build of an application.
So a new virtual machine would be created (from a template is fine, with the OS installed, and some base software installed) --- a new web site would be created in IIS, and the web app build output copied to a location on the virtual machine hard disk, and IIS configured correctly, the VM would start up and run.
I know there are MSBuild tasks to script all the administrative actions in IIS, but how do you script all the actions with Virtual machines? Specifically, creating a new virtual machine from a template, naming it uniquely, starting it, configuring it, etc...
Specifically I was wondering if anyone has successfully implemented any VM scripting as part of a build process.
Update: I assume with Hyper-V, there is a different set of libraries/APIs to script virtual machines, anyone played around with this? And anyone with real practical experience of doing something like this?
Checkout Powershell Management library for Hyper-V on CodePlex. Some features:
Finding a VM
Connecting to a VM
Discovering and manipulating Machine states
Backing up, exporting and snapshotting VMs
Adding and removing VMs, configuring motherboard settings.
Manipulating Disk controllers, drives and disk images
Manipluating Network Interface Cards
Working with VHD files
You can actually script a fair number of tasks in MS Virtual Server:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/vs/default.mspx?mfr=true
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368876(VS.85).aspx
Also Virtual PC guy has got a ton of stuff on his blog about scripting Virtual Server/PC and now Hyper-V here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/default.aspx
VMware has similar capabilities:
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/scripting-API/