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Comment by trymas | Hacker News Reader

> `vagrant up` times will be much faster and the amount of disk space used will be significantly reduced. As an anecdotal measure, a small Linux box on my machine went from a 10 second import to less than second. And a Windows box (typically very large) went from a 40 second import also to less than a second.

I tried this, but it does not seem faster to me. All my projects set up on vagrant from halted state (`vagrant halt`) to up (`vagrant up`) take same amount of time as it was with `vagrant 1.7`.

Or I am doing/understand this wrong?

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The feature isn't enabled by default, you'll need to set linked_clone to true:

https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/virtualbox/configuration.html

"SudoAlex" adjacent has the correct answer. We'll make it default at some point in 1.8.x. We decided last minute to remove the default so that any bugs that are found can be flushed out. So far, none on this feature. But yeah, you have to enable it.

After you enable it, you'll have to `vagrant destroy` before you see the benefits though. Linked clones are from scratch.

The announcement is a bit misleading then:

> Linked cloning will happen automatically if your system supports it. Providers other than VirtualBox and VMware can be updated outside of Vagrant to support linked cloning automatically.

It concerns imports, not booting.

Since they're talking about the "import" maybe they're not talking about from the halted state? Maybe just the initial `vagrant up`?

That's correct. Each time you make a new VM, instead of copying the base box's disk image it creates an new disk image that will only store the differences between your VM's disk and the base box's disk.

Any idea how this feature will work with base box's images that are regularly updated? I've been using ubuntu/trusty64 and it seems to get an update at least once a week.

Base boxes are versioned. You have to keep the old version around if you have any VMs using it.

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