​Just so you know Vagrant is a developer tool.  The servers you create with 
Vagrant are not hardened.  It is good for building servers to test configs 
and as a local dev server for web app development testing.  You would use the 
provisioner (in my case Puppet) to build the hardened version​. 

Puppet is not the only provisioner.  Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, are others.  
Vagrant and Docker work with all of them.  Also check out Packer, made 
by the the developers of Vagrant it uses json files to build the base boxes.

Puppet, and Chef like Vagrant are Ruby based.  Ansible is YAML based
and SaltStack is Python based.  So pick your poison.

However you may be able to stick with BASH as your provisioner, Works for 
most of my needs.  You might even be able to use Packer and BASH to
provision a hardened server though I have not tried it.

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 7:51 PM, James Dugger <james.dugger@gmail.com> wrote:
​Definitely DevOps​.  VM managers like proxmox, vmware etc. are going to be overkill.  
You'll probably spend way too much time trying to figure out how to configure/use the 
manager rather than the real work which is the LAMP server config.  Because your 
running Linux you really have 2 options: 1) build VM's on a hypervisor (VirtualBox on top of Linux) 
or; 2) build VM's using LXC containers (native to the Linux kernel).  Each has pros and cons. 

Hypervisor - VirtualBox
Pros:
- Easy to implement and configure.
- More tutorials online to help with.
- File sharing between guest and host systems built in.

Cons:
- Hypervisor takes up RAM and CPU resources
- File sharing can be very slow.
- File sharing large qty's of files can be problematic.

LXC containers with Docker
Pros:
- Much smaller resource foot print on OS 
- Extremely fast 

Cons:
- Not as many tutorials 
- Harder to implement 
- File sharing not as simple.

While there are ways to mitigate the Cons of both cases, IMHO containers are the future. 
They have so many advantages that save space, overhead, and power consumption
in servers and now that Docker has made them much easier to implement they will be the 
norm in a few years.  But VirtualBox is still easily the solid leader in DevOps use cases 
especially in smaller workflows.

As I said My workflow for server builds is Vagrant -> VirtualBox -> Puppet or BASH = New server.

Now that I use Vagrant and Puppet I will never build another server from scratch again period.

I have  avery simple LAMP dev sever script on GitHub here that you are welcome to use modify steal whatever.
It is very basic.  Vagrant initializes the box and hands it off to BASH as the provisioner.  I use this for
Drupal sandbox servers. It works thought the BASH needs work and there are things that could be 
added/altered especially to make it idempotent. 

https://github.com/netwidget/vagrant-bash-webserver/blob/master/centos64-webserv.sh

Good luck, hope this helps.

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 4:19 PM, <techlists@phpcoderusa.com> wrote:

The testing I want to do is simple.  I want to be able to test current PHP apps (ones I support) on future versions of Apache, PHP, MariaDB.  I am on the CentOS upgrade path and would like to do some testing to include CentOS 7.x and the versions of Apache, PHP, MariaDB before they are included in the upgrade path. Basically I want to get way ahead of any issues so I will have plenty of time to resolve them before I am required to by an O/S upgrade or a change in distro.

I am thinking I will install the complete Mint 17 KDE on the test server and load Virtualbox on to that.  That way I can stay consistent between by desktop and laptop.  I'm hoping I can do the experimenting on the server so if I hose it I can just rebuild it.  Once I find what I want I can test it and if I want to take it with me on the go I can copy the image to my laptop.  This way my desktop and laptop stay stable.

Any thoughts are much appreciated.




On 2014-10-09 17:16, James Dugger wrote:
It depends. What is the purpose of your testing? Proxmox, is a virtual
server manager, much like VMware ESXi & XenServer they simply manage
and monitor VM's.  I would use (and have used) Proxmox to manage
servers in a VLAN (just one example).  However if you are
developing/configuring LAMP servers and testing them individually for
optimization (more DevOps) I would stay with VirtualBox (or Docker
assuming your bare metal Linux kernel has LXC, kernel 3.0 or later)
 and look into provisioning with Vagrant, Chef, Puppet, Ansible,
SaltStack or even BASH.  Vagrant builds the base box and then hands
it off to a provisioner.

To give you an example currently at my work we develop and maintain
large enterprise web applications on LAMP servers.  One of our
systems consist of a Blade enclosure (bare metal),
OS/Hypervisor/manager is VMware ESXi, running VM's configured in a
VLAN.  On top of this we use Vagrant and Puppet to provision, test,
implement, & destroy LAMP servers as we need them.  Because we
maintain the entire LAMP config in code we can version control all of
our servers in Git plus the base box (pick your distro).  The entire
versioned codebase including the base ISO's can fit on a 32GB usb
drive.  I can rebuild these LAMP servers on any environment as long
as it has enough physical memory and compute speed. regardless of the
hypervisor/vm manager.

Don't know if this helps, but just thought I'd share a perspective.

Check out:
Vagrant - https://www.vagrantup.com/ [5]

Puppet -
http://info.puppetlabs.com/download-puppet-enterprise-PPC-1.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Blu-Jae_Puppet&gclid=CjwKEAjw5NihBRCZmdLkuuTHyWYSJACtCY0JoA5k8d3FtnsJ-Lb9DOKsKGCBo2AXRRB37aqC49xN-RoCnIfw_wcB
[6]

Docker - https://www.docker.com/ [7]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 12:43 PM, <techlists@phpcoderusa.com> wrote:

Thanks!!

On 2014-10-09 14:23, Sean Roe wrote:
Im going to have to go with JD.  Proxmox is the best opensource VM
solution period.
Sean

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 11:40 AM, JD Austin <jd@twingeckos.com>
wrote:

Proxmox, your preferred Linux OS with Virtualbox, or using your
preferred Linux OS's KVM/Qemu virtualization will all work about as
well.  Proxmox gives you a nice interface to manage it all; there
are some 'free' VMWare versions you can use as well. 

-- JD Austin
 Voice: 480.269.4335 [1] [1] (480 2MY Geek)

jd@twingeckos.com

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 11:12 AM, <techlists@phpcoderusa.com> wrote:

I provided the wrong specs here is the specs of the box I want to
use

i3-3220 with visualization 


http://ark.intel.com/products/65693/Intel-Core-i3-3220-Processor-3M-Cache-3_30-GHz
[2]
[2]

8GB RAM.

Thank you for your help!!

Keith

On 2014-10-09 13:01, techlists@phpcoderusa.com wrote:
Hi,

I'd like to configure a test box for LAMP development.  What I
have in
mind is setting up multiple VM's on the box and loading a different
distro in each VM.  Probably only need 2 or 3 VMs. The number
might
grow over time.  Will not be configuring X on any of the VM's -
they
will be LAMP servers only.

I seem to recall someone saying I would need a base system on the
box
and then load the VM's on top of that.  Or can I use something
like
Mint and load the VM's on top of that?  Is there a disadvantage to
doing it with Mint as the base system?

The box is an i3 with visualization  -


http://ark.intel.com/products/81018/Intel-Core-i3-4030U-Processor-3M-Cache-1_90-GHz
[3]
[3]
 It has 4GB of RAM which I assume might not be enough.

This box will only be used for testing so I assume each VM will
only
need 1GB of RAM and will probably use much less.

Any direction is much appreciated.

Thanks!!

Keith
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Links:
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[2]

http://ark.intel.com/products/65693/Intel-Core-i3-3220-Processor-3M-Cache-3_30-GHz
[2]
[3]

http://ark.intel.com/products/81018/Intel-Core-i3-4030U-Processor-3M-Cache-1_90-GHz
[3]
[4] http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss [4]

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LINKEDIN [8]


Links:
------
[1] tel:480.269.4335
[2]
http://ark.intel.com/products/65693/Intel-Core-i3-3220-Processor-3M-Cache-3_30-GHz
[3]
http://ark.intel.com/products/81018/Intel-Core-i3-4030U-Processor-3M-Cache-1_90-GHz
[4] http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
 [5] https://www.vagrantup.com/
[6]
http://info.puppetlabs.com/download-puppet-enterprise-PPC-1.html?utm_source=google&amp;utm_medium=cpc&amp;utm_campaign=Blu-Jae_Puppet&amp;gclid=CjwKEAjw5NihBRCZmdLkuuTHyWYSJACtCY0JoA5k8d3FtnsJ-Lb9DOKsKGCBo2AXRRB37aqC49xN-RoCnIfw_wcB
[7] https://www.docker.com/
[8] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-h-dugger/15/64b/74a/

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