117 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
117 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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page_title: "Vagrant 1.5 Feature Preview: Hyper-V, SMB Synced Folders, Windows"
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title: "Feature Preview: Hyper-V, SMB Synced Folders, Windows"
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author: "Mitchell Hashimoto"
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author_url: https://github.com/mitchellh
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---
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Vagrant has worked on Windows for over four years. Vagrant has worked
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_well_ on Windows for about two years. With Vagrant 1.5, Vagrant is
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_excellent_ on Windows with dozens of bug fixes and a couple big Windows-only
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features: Hyper-V and SMB synced folders.
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Vagrant 1.5 will ship with a [Hyper-V](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V)
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provider out of the box. This is big news! This is the first provider other
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than VirtualBox to ship with Vagrant itself (with more to come). And, Hyper-V
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comes built-in to almost all editions of Windows 8+, meaning Vagrant works
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with nothing more than a Windows computer for most people.
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Additionally, Windows users have the option now to use
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[SMB](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block) synced folders.
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SMB is a technology built right into Windows, just like Hyper-V, making
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it easy for Windows users to get high performance synced folders out of
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the box.
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Read on to learn more about these features.
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READMORE
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### Thank You Microsoft
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I'd like to start this post off with a big thanks to
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[MS OpenTech](http://msopentech.com/). MS OpenTech did most of the hard
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work implementing the Hyper-V and SMB synced folder features.
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I only had to merge the code and make it more "Vagrant-friendly," which
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is far easier than the hard technical details to make the features work.
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MS OpenTech will continue improving Vagrant for Windows in the coming
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months, adding more features and support across the board for Windows.
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The biggest feature that is on the way is first class support for
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Windows VMs.
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Thank you MS OpenTech!
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### Hyper-V
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Hyper-V is a native hypervisor built by Microsoft that ships with
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most installations of Windows 8+. While it is built by Microsoft, it
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is able to virtualize any modern x86/x64 operating system, including
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all major distributions of Linux. Of course, it is able to run Windows
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very well, too.
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With Vagrant 1.5, Hyper-V is a provider built-in to Vagrant. No additional
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plugin installs are necessary; just install Vagrant and you're ready.
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<div class="center">
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<img src="/images/blog/hyperv_preview.gif" alt="Vagrant + Hyper-V Example">
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</div>
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A downside of Hyper-V: once it is enabled, no other virtualization technology
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can be used (such as VirtualBox or VMware), so it is an all-in or all-out
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technology choice. The upside, however, is that it is built-in to Windows with no additional
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software installs.
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Vagrant 1.5 will be the first iteration of the Hyper-V provider. The VirtualBox
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and VMware providers are both extremely mature and work very well. While
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the Hyper-V provider works, we expect there to be some bugs and loose ends
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that we'll be improving over upcoming releases.
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### SMB Synced Folders
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Along with the [RSync Synced Folders](/blog/feature-preview-vagrant-1-5-rsync.html)
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coming in Vagrant 1.5, we're introducing support for SMB as a mechanism
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for synced folders.
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SMB is a technology built into Windows that allows you to share any
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Windows folder over the network. For Vagrant, we use this mechanism to
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create a bi-directional folder share with Vagrant environments.
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This is the preferred synced folder mechanism for use with the Hyper-V
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provider, but is not limited to only Hyper-V. SMB is available as a higher
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performance option for VirtualBox, similar to NFS for Linux.
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You can explicitly enable the folder, as usual:
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<pre class="prettyprint lang-ruby">
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config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "smb"
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</pre>
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Or, if you specify nothing, SMB will be used by default if VM
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shared folders aren't available. Therefore, it is recommended to keep your
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Vagrant environment compatible with all operating systems to just leave off
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the type.
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### Other Windows Improvements
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Vagrant 1.5 has dozens of bug fixes to improve the experience of Vagrant
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on Windows. Even if the features above aren't useful to you as a Vagrant
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user on Windows, Vagrant 1.5 is highly recommended.
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In addition to little bug fixes, the Vagrant MSI installers starting with
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Vagrant 1.5 will be properly signed. Over time, this should eliminate most
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warnings when Vagrant is downloaded and installed on Windows, and should
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improve confidence when you download a Vagrant update that it has not
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been tampered with.
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### Next
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This is just the first step in better supporting Windows. We have a few
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more bugs to fix, improvements to make to both Hyper-V and SMB, and more.
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Most importantly, we're gunning to support Windows guests more fully in
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future releases of Vagrant.
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There are even more features and improvements coming in Vagrant 1.5,
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but this concludes the feature preview series for Vagrant 1.5. Expect a
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release soon.
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