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I'm not familiar with ansible so I won't attempt to compare the two but I can offer you a short list of benefits that Vagrant provides over building VMs manuall
by johnbender 13y ago
I'm not familiar with ansible so I won't attempt to compare the two but I can offer you a short list of benefits that Vagrant provides over building VMs manually with Virtualbox, VMWare, etc.
1. Single command setup across virtualization platforms
2. Tight integration with provisioning tools (ships local config to VM and runs)
3. Network configuration*
4. Automated shared folders (includes NFS since VBox has really bad shared folders)
5. Generally homogeneous config across host and virtualization platforms
6. Safe cleanup on command cancellation (ie, very safe/sane command line behavior)
There's much more to add but this is nice short list. [UPDATE] Generally speaking it takes the idea of using VMs locally to guarantee a development environment/state and streamlines the process enormously.
* Most people underestimate the number of ways that you can screw up network config on local VMs.
- zimbatm 13y agoThe combo of point 2 and 4 is what makes the real difference IMO. Since it's easy to provision a new box with a single command and you don't maintain state on them, you get disposable VMs. No more going trough a list of VMs and asking yourself if you left any work on that or if you can scrap it. Just `vagrant destroy` and `vagrant up` when you need it again. Plus the provisioning bits gets tested a lot more.