Vagrant 1.1, VMware Fusion | Hacker News Reader

Vagrant 1.1, VMware Fusion

hashicorp.com

94 pointsgoogletron24 comments

Whew. This was/is a big one.

Vagrant 1.1 is the first release in Vagrant's history that is provider-agnostic. I'm shipping a Fusion provider and open source AWS and RackSpace provider, but the interface itself is completely open source and documented, meaning anyone can add their own providers: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/plugins/providers.html

And the provider API was introduced while retaining full compatibility for stock Vagrant 1.0.x installs. I'm really proud of that achievement. Vagrant 1.1 is a drop-in replacement for many organizations.

Vagrant 1.1 is already in use in production at many large organizations, the biggest of which at the moment may be Yammer. The QA process for 1.1 was actually done by shipping to the big companies first. That was quite an experience, but I think that will result in a stable 1.1 experience for the masses.

Anyways, I'm here to answer any questions if you have them.

AWESOME, no more virtualbox+vmware nonsense now on my macbook.

No questions yet, will test it out when I get home from work as i forgot my laptop at home today.

Why does the VMware Fusion provider cost $30 more than VMware Fusion itself? I'm not against commercial software, but the price is off-putting, particularly for personal use.

I actually tend to view it as $20 less than the professional version of Fusion ($99). :) Hehe. But, yes, the provider works with the trial, regular, and professional versions, so you can argue it is $30 more.

The reason is that VMware Fusion is woefully underpriced on Mac OS X systems, due to steep competition from Parallels. The equivalent on Windows is $249.

My argument is that the value you get out of something like Vagrant + VMware Fusion pays for itself in less than an hour per seat (assuming you're billing more than $79/hour). I find that to be pretty good value, rather than comparing it directly to VMware Fusion.

But the alternatives aren't Vagrant + Fusion versus VMWare on Windows. The alternatives are Vagrant + VirtualBox versus Vagrant + VirtualBox, which is zero cost.

I thought that price included VM Fusion -- as in for $30 more you get the provider also.

Agreed. I was previuosly excited by it, but at this price point, I am no longer. It puts it out of the impulse-buy-to-try-it-out range and squarey into the "I can do without it".

Congratulations! Vagrant is awesome. The blog post says that future releases in the 1.x series will not necessarily be backwards compatible. Does this mean you are not adhering to SemVer? If so, why not?

This is a great question as well. I'm a little concerned by this choice because I'm not looking forward to constantly enforcing updates all across the board.

Yes, I don't adhere to SemVer. I am sorry. If it helps, you can think of it as SemVer if you make the SECOND number the major version (according to semver terminology, it is the X, in X.Y.Z).

I always say this warning to disclaim myself from future backwards incompatibilities, but if I follow 1.x like 0.x at all, then they'll be minimal.

Vagrant 2.0, of course, will introduce long term stability, like Vagrant 1.0. But that is far off. :)

Can you comment on compatibility.

For example, if I decide to buy VMware Fusion for a team of 6 developers today (Professional costs 45 EUR*6 = 270 EUR).

Will I have to spend the same amount each year again or are you going to support each version (and potential changes to the APIs) down the road? I have no idea how drastic changes are going to be from Fusion 5 to 6 and beyond.

From reading your announcement, it seems like your plugin is a one time fee. I've seen other companies try this business model for software only to replace it with a yearly license down the road. Any thoughts on this?

Does the email support include a response time, etc.?

And I forgot another — any thoughts on volume licenses? E.g. a pack of 10.

There may be an upgrade fee associated with new versions. I haven't decided yet. Even if there is, it won't be the full cost of the license.

I won't ever charge an annual license fee is because the long term business model of HashiCorp is _not_ licenses. This is just a way to keep going and have folks support Vagrant.

Email includes a 48 hour response time.

Contact me at mitchell@hashicorp.com and I'd love to talk to you about this in more detail.

In general a cool release, mostly because it finally adds providers. However, given the price point of 79 USD per seat, I can hold my breath a little longer, especially since VMWare adds another 50-70 Euros on top of that. That's somewhere in the ballpark of 140 USD to replace something that's basically working fine.

I don't think you need to use VMWare. I understood from the article that you can upgrade to 1.1 and continue to use VirtualBox as the provider with basically no hiccups.

Yeah, I must admit I was confused by this as well. Do we need Fusion + a license for the Vagrant VMWare provider, or is the Vagrant VMWare provider stand-alone?

You need both, thats why its a steep price.

Certainly I can continue to use Virtualbox. However, VMWare is more efficient and more stable - virtualbox is a bit slow and tends to crash your mac once in a while. I'd be willing to shell out some money for that feature, but given the price I probably won't, at least not in the near future.

A DigitalOcian.com provider already in the works by johnbender[1].

[1] https://github.com/johnbender/vagrant-digitalocean

So looking at the AWS plugin, this means that I can spin up a puppet-configured machine that is very similar to my dev environment, other than (1) no filesystem sharing and (2) I don't control the network. That's fairly snazzy, in terms of controlling dev and prod in the same manner.

Wow - I'm excited about the provider interface, especially for AWS and the other cloud services.

Question - could Vagrant work with LXC?

> Question - could Vagrant work with LXC?

Easily.

I'm on it https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc ;) I need to make it work as a real Vagrant plugin since I started it before 1.1 was actually released

Definitely happy about this, especially since AWS is one of the providers.

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