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Objectives

The objectives of this lab is helping you to master VirtualBox deployment on your Laptop. The local deployment could be useful to:

  • Prototyping application locally without network latency
  • Work on air gap environment (isolated for security reason or on to spare resources)
  • Have a local CI
  • Reduce resource usage (Desktop or Server) by leveraging your development host

Important

These labs will be reused for the future deployment, so don't miss it please !

Add VBOXManange to your user PATH

This can be done by changing the "PAth" entry in your environment.
This is most probably in "C:\Program files\Oracle\virtualbox"

Trick

To reload env variables in an existing command or Powershell terminal Use: refreshenv.exe

Vboxmanage

vboxmanage showvminfo worker1
Look if VT-x options are activated

Tip

For a future use:
Under git-bash or any WSL Linux machine (if virtualbox is added to Environment PATH variable)

   VBoxManage.exe showvminfo worker1|grep NIC


   vboxmanage showvminfo controller --details| select-string 'Nic 1 rule'

Labs 1: Using Linux Box with Vagrant

Step 1: Start a VM

To create a VM using Vagrant you have several options. By default, you have Cloud base VM Box available

By default, vagrant will go to internet to get the Vagrant Boxes.
It will download the image only one times.
Sometime we prefer to work OFFLINE for many reasons ( No access, security, network bandwidth ... )

We will first download the box buster64 image... then integrates it locally using vagrant box

You have just to do something like: 

  vagrant box add buster64 file:///$Env:USERPROFILE/Downloads/
  vagrant box list

Then, create your own directory, for instance %USERPROFILE%/MyApp/vagrant. 

  cd $Env:USERPROFILE/MyApp/vagrant
  # This command will create a Vagrantfile
  vagrant init buster64
  vagrant up
The first command vagrant init generate a Vagrantfile
The second command vagrant up deploy/instantiate the VM.

Note

The default machine configuration may use a lot of ressources (memory / CPU ) ... take care.

Note

Vagrant networks options are quite limited on Virtualbox ( Nat and intnet )
To manage a Nat Network with vagrant: Vagrant virtual networking

Remark

if you have issues with proxy

   set http_proxy=http://user:password@host:port
   set https_proxy=https://user:password@host:port
   vagrant plugin install vagrant-proxyconf

then

   set VAGRANT_HTTP_PROXY=%http_proxy%
   set VAGRANT_HTTPS_PROXY=%https_proxy%
   set VAGRANT_NO_PROXY="127.0.0.1"
   vagrant up

Step 2: access the VM using ssh

You have several way to access the VM using SSH. The easiest way is by doing a:

   # this will be "default" if we don't define the name
   vagrant status
   vagrant ssh default

The second way is by finding where the private key is located and then create a config file in your $HOME/.ssh directory.

Alternative :

you can use this labs correction: https://github.com/omerlin/yncrea-virtualization-labs

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vagrantfile/machine_settings

Labs 2: create a local Network of Linux Box

You need to start 2 VM, create a Nat Network and check :

  • VM are reachable on the Nat network
  • The VM can access to internet
  • You can reach the 2 guest VM from the host using ssh alias

Correction

See: https://github.com/omerlin/yncrea-virtualization-labs You have in the TwoBoxes the Vagrant file

ssh vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2200
ssh vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2222

Integrates all together

We will configure the 3 machines - so they belongs to the same internal network and are connected using Mobaxterm.

To see the vagrant environments (and clean old one): 

vagrant global-status --prune

Then you can find the "private_key" of each vagrant VMs using a Unix (or Windows) "find" command.