I needed a virtual machine on my laptop to use with Oz for offline testing. Since Oz uses kvm to install the guest image, I would need nested hypervisor support. Virtualbox doesn't provide this, but VMware Fusion does.

Another requirement for any development testing cycle using virtual machines is Vagrant and so the first thing I needed was the Vagrant VMware Provider. Step 2 was setting up a base box with the required environment.

Hashicorp, the people behind vagrant, have a new product out called Packer that I used to create the base box. Packer could actually be used to replace Oz in a lot of situations, but this is for a larger project that relies on a number of Oz specifics. You can grab my packer-raring-fusion definition which sets up a small image with:

  • Installs VMware tools with some needed patches for 3.8 kernels
  • Installs Vagrant insecure public key
  • Downloads Packer and unzips in bin/
  • Enables VHV for nested hypervisors on the guest
  • Sets Vagrant User password to 'packer'

or the packaged base box (650MB).