vagrant/website/docs/source/v2/providers/basic_usage.html.md

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Basic Usage - Providers providers-basic-usage

Basic Provider Usage

Boxes

Boxes are all provider-specific. A box for VirtualBox is incompatible with the VMware Fusion provider, or any other provider. A box must be installed for each provider, and can share the same name as other boxes as long as the providers differ. So you can have both a VirtualBox and VMware Fusion "precise64" box.

Installing boxes hasn't changed at all:

$ vagrant box add \
  precise64 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box

Vagrant now automatically detects what provider a box is for. This is visible when listing boxes. Vagrant puts the provider in parentheses next to the name, as can be seen below.

$ vagrant box list
precise64 (virtualbox)
precise64 (vmware_fusion)

Vagrant Up

Once a provider is installed, it is used by calling vagrant up with the --provider flag, specifying the provider you want to back the machine. No other configuration is necessary! What this looks like:

$ vagrant up --provider=vmware_fusion

If the provider is well-behaved then everything should just work. Of course, each provider typically exposes custom configuration options to fine tune and control that provider, but defaults should work great to get started.

From this point forward, you can use all the other commands without specifying a --provider; Vagrant is able to figure it out on its own. Specifically, once you run vagrant up --provider, Vagrant is able to see what provider is backing an existing machine, so commands such as destroy, suspend, etc. do not need to be told what provider to use.

Limitations

Vagrant currently restricts you to bringing up one provider per machine. If you have a multi-machine environment, you can bring up one machine backed by VirtualBox and another backed by VMware Fusion, for example, but you can't back the same machine with both VirtualBox and VMware Fusion.

<p>
	This is a limitation that will be removed in a future version of
	Vagrant.
</p>