Building Vagrant for Hyper-V

Building Vagrant for Hyper-V

Sources

https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/building-a-vagrant-box

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/boxes/base.html

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/hyperv/

Vagrant is a great tool for making life easier when it comes to creating local development environments.   Its power at making it easy to on-board new members of a team, have them up and running quickly with the same configuration and tools as the rest of the team as well as being able to set up and run a local copy of production quickly and to eliminate the ubiquitous errors of “It works on my machine” are all plus points.

Vagrant’s default VM environment is VirtualBox, but it does have providers for other environments such as VMWare, Hyper-V.   The purpose of this article is to look at how to set up a Vagrant Box for Hyper-V, for those of you that choose to, want to or can only deploy to Hyper-V.

NOTE: I also run Docker on my VM Host machine and this article assumes Docker is installed.

Creating a Vagrant BOX file

BOX files are compressed files that contain meta data about an image and the Image of the Virtual Machine being built.

We are going to be creating a Hyper-V VM for Ubuntu from scratch and then package it for Vagrant and upload it to the Hashicorp Atlas site.

Creating the base image

We are going to set up our base image using the Hyper-V Manager.   Once you have that up and running you will need to select New -> Virtual Machine from the actions menu and create a new machine with the following settings

Specify Name and Location

Name : hyperv-ubuntu64

Specify Generation :

Generation 2 (more on this bit in a moment)

Assign Memory

Startup memory : 4096mb

Use Dynamic Memory for the virtual machine : true

Configure Networking

        Connection : External Virtual Switch

Connect Virtual Hard Disk

        Create a virtual hard disk : true

        Size : 20Gb

        Installation Options

Install an operating system from a bootable image file – to use this you will need to download the latest Ubuntu image from https://www.ubuntu.com/download  (I have used “Ubuntu Server 16.04.1 LTS”)

Once the base VM has been created you will need to disable “Secure Boot”, In Hyper-V Manager, open the settings for the hyperv-ubuntu64 VM and in Security un check “Enable Secure Boot” and “OK” the settings to save

Installing Ubuntu

We do need to create a Virtual Machine that we can use as our target for our BOX file.  Setting up Ubuntu is fairly easy and you only have to follow the on-screen prompts.   We do have some specific needs, so when prompted set the following

        Hostname : hyperv-ubuntu64

        Username : vagrant

        Password :  vagrant

Use weak password

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/boxes/base.html

Installing Software - When asked what software can be installed, select Samba File Server and Open SSH Server.

Setting the root password

Vagrant has many aspects that expect the default user to have a passwordless sudo for the “vagrant” user which we need to set up.

Run the hyperv-ubuntu64 image and login using the vagrant users account.  We now need to set this account up as a Super User. Enter the following

sudo passwd root

and when prompted for the new password, enter “vagrant”.   You will need to sign in as the root user so that we can set up the Super User

su –

Setting up the Super User

As Vagrant must be able to run sudo commands without a password prompt, we need to add the “vagrant” user to the sudoers list, like this

sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant

Before you save this file add the following to it

vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

To test if the change we have just made works type

sudo pwd

Making the VM Visible

When Vagrant is executed to build the VM our image is going to be used for it needs to know the IP address of the image so that it can access it.  By default Hyper-V will not report the IP address until we add the linux-cloud tools, which we do with the following

Sudo apt-get install linux-cloud-tools-$(uname -r)

$(uname -r) tells apt to get the correct version of linux-cloud-tools for our version of Ubuntu

After running this command, you should now be able to see in the “Network” tab the IP address that has been allocated of our VM.

Updating

We want our box to be as current as possible, so lets do that

sudo apt-get update -y

sudo apt-get upgrade -y

If there were any kernel updates as part of update and upgrade process, we will want to reboot our server

sudo shutdown -r now

Configuring OPENSSH Server

Vagrant uses SSH to communicate with our server and uses an insecure vagrant key to start with which we need to set up with the following

mkdir -p /home/vagrant/.ssh

chmod 0700 /home/vagrant/.ssh

wget --no-check-certificate \ https://raw.github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/master/keys/vagrant.pub \ -O /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys

chmod 0600 /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys

chown -R vagrant /home/vagrant/.ssh

We need to tell the OPENSSH Server that we are using authorized_keys and where to find them, so using nano we are do the following

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

and then find and uncomment the line, from

#AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys

To

AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys