Monthly Archives: May 2012

MaestroDev named DevOps “Cool Vendor” by Gartner

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
2

MaestroDev logo

Warning, some self-promotion ahead! 🙂

Gartner has published their annual list of Cool Vendors, including a section for DevOps, where we are one of the 5 selected companies.

Not a big fan of this analyst things, but quite proud of being included in such a short list, right next to the people from CFEngine, Opscode and Puppet Labs, that are very active on the DevOps space and, in the case of PuppetLabs, whose products we use heavily for automation.

MaestroDev, an innovation leader in DevOps Orchestration, has been included in the list of “Cool Vendors in DevOps, 2012” report by Gartner, Inc.

And thanks to our great customers too!

Keith Campbell, CTO, Informatics, said “The Maestro product has automated our build process all the way through packaging. We are using our same toolset, but the Maestro Composition engine gives us consistency and speed that we did not have before. With Maestro, we are planning our development-cloud environment as well — reducing our build cost even further because we can dynamically integrate hybrid resources and external services into our workflows.”

You can check out the rest of the press release at the MaestroDev blog, and the Gartner Cool Vendors report.

Automatically download and install VirtualBox guest additions in Vagrant

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
4

So, are you already using Vagrant to manage your VirtualBox VMs?

Then you probably have realized already how annoying is to keep the VBox guest additions up to date in your VMs.

Don’t worry, you can update them with just one command or automatically on each start using the Vagrant-vbguest plugin.

Installation

Requires vagrant 0.9.4 or later (including 1.0)

Since vagrant v1.0.0 the prefered installation method for vagrant is using the provided packages or installers.

Therefore if you installed Vagrant as a package (rpm, deb, dmg,…)

vagrant gem install vagrant-vbguest

Or if you installed vagrant using RubyGems (gem install vagrant):

gem install vagrant-vbguest

Usage

By default the plugin will check what version of the guest additions is installed in the VM every time it is started with vagrant start. Note that it won’t be checked when resuming a box.

In any case, it can be disabled in the Vagrantfile

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  # set auto_update to false, if do NOT want to check the correct additions
  # version when booting this machine
  config.vbguest.auto_update = false
end

If it detects an outdated version, it will automatically install the matching version from the VirtualBox installation, located at

  • linux : /usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso
  • Mac : /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso
  • Windows : %PROGRAMFILES%/Oracle/VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso

The location can be overridden with the iso_path parameter in your Vagrantfile, and can point to a http server

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vbguest.iso_path = "#{ENV['HOME']}/Downloads/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso"
  # or
  config.vbguest.iso_path = "http://company.server/VirtualBox/$VBOX_VERSION/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso"
end

If you have disabled the automatic update, it still easy to manually update the VirtualBox Guest Additions version, just running from the command line

vagrant vbguest