Experimenting with the vagrant-qemu-provider

Today I came across a qemu provider for Vagrant. I have a PC set up with Proxmox, however; I kind of don’t want to have this machine hooked up and running all of the time. It is very underutilized. I only use it when I have the time or interest to experiment.

Setup is easy:

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brew install qemu
vagrant plugin install vagrant-qemu

And then we can try using a provided example:

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vagrant init ppggff/centos-7-aarch64-2009-4K
vagrant up --provider qemu

Vagrant will start setting things up and you will be prompted for a username and password for SMB.

At this point you will probably get an error if you are on macOS complaining about an authentication failure for SMB. All you need to do is set up SMB File Sharing for macOS if you haven’t done so already. HashiCorp has a note on it here.

Once the qemu VM has been started up by Vagrant you can connect to it with vagrant ssh

Your home directory on your host will be mapped to /vagrant in the VM.

This solution seems the best for me right now on the M1 Mac. Qemu is very powerful and should even allow me to run operating systems for architectures other than ARM using Vagrant.