It is crucial for developers to be authoring code and test it in a production-like environment. Asking extra hardware most time costs prohibited route. Fortunately, virtualization and containerization provide developers with sufficient tools to manage this. This post will focus on the Vagrant to establish virtual machines on window os.

Create a base box

following the instruction to set up the base window server 2012 r2 image. note: you have to enable the VT_X(virtualization) in bios to able to use virtual box

Add base box

vagrant box add WinServerBase C:\Mydata\Virtual\windows_2012_r2_virtualbox.box

Start base box

vagrant init WinServerBase

vagrant up

vagrant rdp

Prevision

you will need to modify the Vagrantfile to provision the virtual box to host the website or other applications, like

config.vm.provision "shell",path:"installCplusRuntime.cmd" config.vm.provision :shell, path:"disable-firewall.ps1"

  1. (http://www.developer.com/net/virtualize-your-windows-development-environments-with-vagrant-packer-and-chocolatey-part-1.html)

    ↩

  2. (http://www.developer.com/net/virtualize-your-windows-development-environments-with-vagrant-packer-and-chocolatey-part-2.html)

    ↩