Ditching Vagrant: Why I Switched to KVM and libvirt on Debian
Ditching Vagrant: VMs with KVM and Virsh on Debian
After years of relying on Vagrant, I realized I was adding unnecessary complexity to my workflow. I decided to embrace native Linux tools like KVM, libvirt, and virsh to manage my virtual machines directly. This shift not only simplified my setup but also allowed for more deterministic builds using preseeding, proving that sometimes the best tool is the one already built into your kernel.
I started feeling like a weenie. I began feeling like a smelly little turd. Worst of all, I realized that I was being lazy.
- veeti
I never got into Vagrant but "lima" has worked well for spinning up (temporary) VM's quick: https://lima-vm.io/
There's plenty of images for different distributions, automatic file sharing between host and guest, etc.
- ianeff
Mama, what a read! Nice work! Same story on macos: recently ditched the big (corpulent, distended, ossified) vagrant + virtualbox _repositories_ for some spritely lima + apple virtualization framework scripts, and been happier for it.
It was a forklift, to be sure, but the machines're snappier, & you buy yourself a little headroom.
- fulafel
For many use cases you'll do fine without the libvirt tower of babel, with just the qemu/kvm cli.
- influx
What are people using Vagrant for these days? The last time I encountered it was before Docker become widespread.
- regexorcist
These days I'm just using plain qemu directly and managing the bridges with systemd-networkd.