While a lot of effort is spent on automating the installation of the machine OS and its application, I see that the provisioning of a virtual machine is often still done by the GUI. So why not automate that step too.

Linux tuning information is scattered among many hundreds of sites, each with a little bit of knowledge. Virtual machine tuning information is equally scattered about. This is my attempt at indexing all of it.

While new technologies and delivery models have made it much simpler to manage the infrastructure, this is not where our core inefficiencies lie. Virtualization principles must be extended to higher levels of the application stack, to make it easier for all of us to manage, tune and integrate applications.

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments, providing easy to configure, lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual machines targeted at development environments. Vagrant includes automated virtual machine creation using Oracle’s VirtualBox, automated provisioning of virtual environments using Opscode Chef, port forwarding to the host machine, full SSH access to created environments, shared folders, packaging environments into distributable boxes, and easy teardown and rebuild of your environments.