Some readers might find this post to be a little “in the weeds” and cover details they are already familiar with. I struggled in my first attempts to get Vagrant working on CentOS, because I couldn’t find any good tutorials that covered the entire process. If you get bored with basic network configuration or have another preferred method for installing Ruby, please understand I’m trying to provide as much detail as possible to those without much linux experience. I am also assuming you have a working vCenter, ESXi hosts and dhcp server configured to assign IP addresses for the Vagrant virtual machines we will be deploying.
1. Create a CentOS 6.x minimal virtual machine for installing Vagrant.
Create or clone a fresh CentOS 6.x minimal virtual machine. I already had an existing Centos 6.5 minimal template that I simply cloned for this purpose.
2. Power on the new cloned vm and connect to the virtual machine console
3. Modify /etc/sysconfig/network, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 & /etc/resolv.conf to reflect the network settings for your vagrant vm:
[root@vagrant ~]# cat /etc/sysconfig/network
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=vagrant.mylab.net
GATEWAY=192.168.1.1
[root@vagrant ~]# cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
TYPE=Ethernet
ONBOOT=yes
NM_CONTROLLED=no
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.1.40
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
[root@vagrant ~]# cat /etc/resolv.conf
search mylab.net
nameserver 192.168.1.1
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.44. Restart the vm for the hostname change to take affect
5. SSH to the vagrant vm using the IP address you assigned in /etc/sysconf/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
6. Install Ruby 1.9.3. There are several ways to install ruby 1.9.3 on CentOS, but I’ll cover using ruby-build to accomplish this:
- Use yum to install the packages we’ll need to get ruby, rubygems and vagrant installed:
[root@vagrant ~]# yum install -y gcc-c++ glibc-headers openssl-devel readline libyaml-devel readline-devel zlib zlib-devel iconv-devel libxml2 libxml2-devel libxslt libxslt-devel wget git- Pull down the latest version of ruby-build using git:
[root@vagrant ~]# git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git- Change to the directory the previous command created:
[root@vagrant ~]# cd ruby-build/- Run the ‘install.sh’ script to install ruby-build:
[root@vagrant ruby-build]# ./install.sh- I have not been successful in getting vagrant-vsphere to run on any version of ruby newer than 1.9.3-p545. As a result I would recommend installing that version with the following command:
[root@vagrant ruby-build]# ruby-build --definitionsruby-build 1.9.3-p545 /usr/local/
Downloading yaml-0.1.6.tar.gz...
-> http://dqw8nmjcqpjn7.cloudfront.net/5fe00cda18ca5daeb43762b80c38e06e
Installing yaml-0.1.6...
Installed yaml-0.1.6 to /usr/local/
Downloading ruby-1.9.3-p545.tar.gz...
-> http://dqw8nmjcqpjn7.cloudfront.net/8e8f6e4d7d0bb54e0edf8d9c4120f40c
Installing ruby-1.9.3-p545...
Installed ruby-1.9.3-p545 to /usr/local/7. We will next need to install rubygems. The process I used was to download the latest version from rubygems.org and install it:
- Use wget to download the latest version listed on the rubygems download page:
[root@vagrant ruby-build]# cd ~/
[root@vagrant ~]# wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-2.2.2.tgz- Use tar to unzip the tar-gzipped file we downloaded:
[root@vagrant ~]# tar xvzf rubygems-2.2.2.tgz
[root@vagrant ~]# cd rubygems-2.2.2- Install rubygems by running the ‘setup.rb’ script:
[root@vagrant rubygems-2.2.2]# ruby setup.rb8. Installing Vagrant
- Use wget to download the latest version listed on the Vagrant download page:
[root@vagrant rubygems-2.2.2]# cd ~/
[root@vagrant ~]# wget https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/vagrant/vagrant_1.5.2_x86_64.rpm- Use the ‘rpm’ command to install the RPM package we downloaded in the previous step:
[root@vagrant ~]# rpm -i vagrant_1.5.2_x86_64.rpm- Export the directory that the vagrant executable was install to, in order to make it easier to run:
[root@vagrant ~]# export PATH=$PATH:/opt/vagrant/bin/9. Installing the vagrant-vsphere plugin
- The nokogiri gem, which is a ruby HTML, XML & SAM parser, is required by vagrant-vsphere so we will install it with the following commands:
[root@vagrant ~]# gem install nokogiri
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed nokogiri-1.6.1
unable to convert "\x89" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-redhat-linux/ports/libxslt/1.1.26/libxslt-1.1.26/tests/xmlspec/logo-REC, skipping
unable to convert "\xF6" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-redhat-linux/ports/libxslt/1.1.26/libxslt-1.1.26/libxslt/xslt.c, skipping
unable to convert "\xF6" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-redhat-linux/ports/libxslt/1.1.26/libxslt-1.1.26/ChangeLog, skipping
unable to convert "\xE1" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-redhat-linux/ports/libxslt/1.1.26/libxslt-1.1.26/NEWS, skipping
unable to convert "\xFD" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-redhat-linux/ports/libxslt/1.1.26/libxslt-1.1.26/win32/Readme.txt, skipping
unable to convert "\xC0" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-redhat-linux/ports/libxml2/2.8.0/libxml2-2.8.0/test/XInclude/ents/isolatin.txt, skipping
unable to convert "\xE4" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-redhat-linux/ports/libxml2/2.8.0/libxml2-2.8.0/doc/examples/testWriter.c, skipping
unable to convert "\xF8" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-redhat-linux/ports/libxml2/2.8.0/libxml2-2.8.0/testapi.c, skipping
unable to convert "\xE9" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-redhat-linux/ports/libxml2/2.8.0/libxml2-2.8.0/runtest.c, skipping
unable to convert "\xF8" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-redhat-linux/ports/libxml2/2.8.0/libxml2-2.8.0/entities.c, skipping
unable to convert "\xC0" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ports/x86_64-redhat-linux/libxslt/1.1.26/bin/xsltproc, skipping
unable to convert "\xE4" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ports/x86_64-redhat-linux/libxml2/2.8.0/share/doc/libxml2-2.8.0/html/testWriter.c, skipping
unable to convert "\xC0" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ports/x86_64-redhat-linux/libxml2/2.8.0/bin/xmllint, skipping
unable to convert "\xC0" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for ports/x86_64-redhat-linux/libxml2/2.8.0/bin/xmlcatalog, skipping
1 gem installed- Next we will install the rbvmomi gem with the following command. rbvmomi is a ruby interface for using the vSphere API.
[root@vagrant ~]# gem install rbvmomi
Successfully installed rbvmomi-1.8.1
1 gem installed- Now we can install the vagrant-vsphere plugin with the following command:
[root@vagrant ~]# vagrant plugin install vagrant-vsphere
Installing the 'vagrant-vsphere' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-vsphere (0.8.1)'!8. Configuring vagrant-vsphere
The vagrant-vsphere README.md on github mentions we need to create a vSphere box from the metadata.json located in the example_box directory.
- We can use the linux the “find” command to determine the path to the example_box directory:
[root@vagrant ~]# find / -name example_box
/root/.vagrant.d/gems/gems/vagrant-vsphere-0.8.1/example_box- Now we can change directory to that directory and create the necessary dummy box file:
[root@vagrant ~]# cd /root/.vagrant.d/gems/gems/vagrant-vsphere-0.8.1/example_box
[root@vagrant example_box]# tar cvzf dummy.box ./metadata.json
./metadata.json- Next we will create a new folder under /root for storing the box file we created and other vagrant configuration files
[root@vagrant example_box]# mkdir -p ~/vagrant-vms/example_box
[root@vagrant example_box]# mv dummy.box ~/vagrant-vms/example_box- Vagrant reads it’s configuration from a file named Vagrantfile, located in the directory from which the “vagrant up” command is run in. We need to go back to our “vagrant-vms” folder and create this file:
[root@vagrant example_box]# cd ~/vagrant-vms/
[root@vagrant vagrant-vms]# touch Vagrantfile- Modify the Vagrantfile to reflect your vsphere configuration. Here’s an example of my working Vagrantfile:
[root@vagrant vagrant-vms]# cat Vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'dummy'
config.vm.box_url = './example_box/dummy.box'
config.vm.provider :vsphere do |vsphere|
vsphere.host = 'vcenter.mylab.net'
vsphere.name = 'vagrant-test'
vsphere.clone_from_vm = true
vsphere.template_name = 'Centos-6.5'
vsphere.user = 'root@localos'
vsphere.password = 'S0meR@nd0mP@ssw0rd'
vsphere.insecure = true
end
endIn this configuration file:
- “vsphere.host” is your vCenter server FQDN or IP address
- “vsphere.name” will be the name of the virtual machine that gets created
- “vsphere.clone_from_vm” specifies we will be cloning a vm rather than template
- “vsphere.template_name” is the name of the vm we will be cloning
- “vsphere.user” is the username we will be using to connect to vCenter
- “vsphere.password” is the password we will be using to connect ot vCenter
- “vsphere.insecure” tells vagrant to not worry about validating the certificate on the vCenter server
9. Vagrant up!!!!
If everything has gone correctly up to this point we can issue a “vagrant up –provider=vsphere” command from the directory that contains the Vagrantfile:
[root@vagrant vagrant-vms]# vagrant up --provider=vsphere
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'vsphere' provider...
==> default: Calling vSphere CloneVM with the following settings:
==> default: -- Source VM: CentOS-6.5
==> default: -- Name: vagrant-test
==> default: Waiting for SSH to become available...You should see a “Clone virtual machine” task being run on your vCenter server and then completing.
10. Canceling the “Vagrant up” command and destroying our cloned vm.
Since we have not properly prepared the vm we are cloning (I will have another blog post covering this topic) Vagrant will never be able to successfully connect to the cloned vm using SSH. As a result we will need to cancel the “vagrant up” command:
- Press [control-c] to attempt to gracefully exit “vagrant-up”
^C==> default: Waiting for cleanup before exiting...I’ve never seen this task complete so I will press [control-c] again to immediately exit:
^C==> default: Exiting immediately, without cleanup!- Destroy the cloned vm by running “vagrant destroy” command:
[root@vagrant vagrant-vms]# vagrant destroy
==> default: Calling vSphere PowerOff
==> default: Calling vShpere DestroyYou should see a “Power Off virtual machine” and “Delet virtual machine” tasks being run and then completing on your vCenter server.