Running vagrant inside of a virtualbox instance

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ShoeLace

Gawd
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Apr 5, 2006
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I heard that you might need an i7 or a modern AMD CPU to be able to run vagrant/virtualbox inside of another virtual box. Can anyone confirm this?

I'm curious if it's possible to have a guest VM ran by virtualbox spin up a vagrant instance inside of it.

I tried it on my old ~7 year old machine and the vagrant instance just times out constantly when trying to boot. I thought maybe I ran out of resources.

What I did was launch a virtualbox instance from my windows host, I allocated 1 gig to it. Then I told vagrant to use 512mb inside of that VM and it just never boots.

I can run 2 virtualbox instances side by side from within my windows host with each getting 512mb of ram but this doesn't help me for what I'm trying to do. Although I do think this proves my machine is capable of running 2 VMs at least which makes me wonder if there is some truth about running a virtualbox instance WITHIN another virtualbox instance.
 
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You'd have to have something that supports passing the advanced portions of AMDV/VT-X through to the guest for it to use. There are several ways to do this, but yes, it generally takes a modern (Sandy Bridge+) CPU to pull it off and have the required features.

I don't know how to do it on vBox, but I know how to do it on ESX.
 
Thanks. So it really is a hardware limitation at this point?

What are some of the several other ways to do it?
 
ShoeLace said:
Thanks. So it really is a hardware limitation at this point?

What are some of the several other ways to do it?
Click to expand...

Hardware and software. Hardware IOMMU and virtualization support, plus the software has to have the ability to pass that on to something else. On ESX, it requires enabling a system wide feature (vhv.enable=true), and then setting the guests to "see" hardware virtualization.
 
Hmm I don't think vagrant has a driver for ESX. They only mentioned VMWare Fusion/Workstation on their site along with their normal vBox support.
 
That's because Vagrant is a wrapper around type-2 hypervisors, not type-1. Type-1 hypervisors have their own management software built in, in some form.
 
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