Vagrant is a handy and easy-to-use Virtual Machine tool that can be used within your command-line interface. In a nutshell, it makes it easy to create and configure lightweight, reproducible developer environments.

In this mini course, you will learn all about virtualization. You will learn how to set up a Vagrant environment, build your own VM, as well as Vagrant commands which you can use from the command line.

In the latter half of the course, you will learn how to work with vagrantfile, networking, and data sharing. In all, this is your crash course for understanding the fundamentals of Vagrant.

A Guide to Vagrant and Virtual Machines


# What is virtualization?

Virtualization is the creation of a virtual copy of your hardware resources, which can be done using any virtualization software. Whenever you create a Virtual Machine using software, such as Oracle **VirtualBox, VMware**, or any other Virtual Machine software, the software takes a virtual copy of your hardware and uses this hardware copy to run your Virtual Machine in conjunction with your host machine.

>Virtualization is the creation of a virtual version from an actual version of an operating system, hardware, etc.

OS virtualization can enable hardware to simultaneously run multiple copies of OS on the same system.


# How does virtualization work

Software called hypervisors allow us to create a virtual version from an actual version of hardware, software, etc. Hypervisors can either sit on top of an operating system (like a laptop) or be installed directly onto hardware (like a server), the latter being how enterprises virtualize. Hypervisors take your physical resources and divide them up so that virtual environments can use them.

We’ll talk more about hypervisors in the next lesson.

In this lesson, we'll look into the basics of virtualization and how it works before starting with Vagrant.

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Basic Overview of Virtualization

What is virtualization?