Overview

Oracle VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. In this article only the needed methods are described to use VirtualBox with Vagrant to save, restore and destroy virtual machines. Indeed it is not necessary to know much about VirtualBox. Vagrant will do all steps for you. If you still want to know more about VirtualBox, you should read the VirtualBox User Manual.

Save all virtual machines

Sometimes it makes sense to save the current state of all virtual machines before testing a new Ansible Role. If something goes wrong, you can go back to the saved state.

On the virtual host system go to the project directory and do the following:

cd <path>/ansible-development
vagrant halt
vagrant snapshot save initial-setup

Note

Here initial-setup is the name for this snapshot. The snapshot list can be printed with:

vagrant snapshot list

Save a single machine

If only a single machine is to be saved, eg. el6-node1, the following commands can be executed:

vagrant halt el6-node1
vagrant snapshot save el6-node1 initial-setup

Restore all machines

You can restore the saved state with:

vagrant snapshot restore initial-setup

Restore a single machine

To restore a single machine, the name of the machine must explicitly be specified.

vagrant snapshot restore el6-node1 initial-setup

Here the machine el6-node1 will be restored to state initial-setup.

Delete the hole Vagrant environment

If you have done your work then the next command stops the running machines which Vagrant is managing and destroys all resources that were created during the creation process. After running this command, your computer should be left at a clean state, as if you never created the guest machines in the first place.

vagrant destroy -f

Delete a single machine

The removal of a single machine is again shown using the example of el6-node1:

vagrant destroy el6-node1 -f