Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1707.01)

We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.9 and CentOS Linux 7.3.1611 for x86_64, featuring updated packages to 31 July 2017 and the following changes:

• we are again using the same kickstarts for Hyper-V and the other hypervisors
• you can now login on the serial console (useful if networking is broken)

Known Issues

1. The VirtualBox Guest Additions are not preinstalled; if you need them for shared folders, please install the vagrant-vbguest plugin and add the following line to your Vagrantfile:

   config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "virtualbox"

   We recommend using NFS instead of VirtualBox shared folders if possible; you can also use the vagrant-sshfs plugin, which, unlike NFS, works on all operating systems.

2. Since the Guest Additions are missing, our images are preconfigured to use rsync for synced folders. Windows users can either use SMB for synced folders, or disable the sync directory by adding the line

   config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", disabled: true

   to their Vagrantfile, to prevent errors on "vagrant up".

3. Vagrant 1.8.5 is unable to create new CentOS Linux boxes due to Vagrant bug #7610
4. Vagrant 1.8.7 is unable to download or update boxes due to Vagrant bug #7969.
5. Vagrant 1.9.1 broke private networking, see Vagrant bug #8166
6. Vagrant 1.9.3 doesn't work with SMB sync due to Vagrant bug #8404
7. The vagrant-libvirt plugin is only compatible with Vagrant 1.5 to 1.8
8. Installing open-vm-tools is not enough for enabling shared folders with Vagrant’s VMware provider. Please follow the detailed instructions in https://github.com/mvermaes/centos-vmware-tools (updated for this release).

Recommended Setup on the Host

Our automatic testing is running on a CentOS Linux 7 host, using Vagrant 1.9.4 with vagrant-libvirt and VirtualBox 5.1.20 (without the Guest Additions) as providers. We strongly recommend using the libvirt provider when stability is required.

We also performed additional manual testing with Vagrant 1.9.6 on OS X 10.11.6, with VirtualBox 5.1.22.

Downloads

The official images can be downloaded from Hashicorp’s Atlas. We provide images for libvirt-kvm, VirtualBox and VMware.

If you never used our images before:

vagrant box add centos/6 # for CentOS Linux 6, or...
vagrant box add centos/7 # for CentOS Linux 7

Existing users can upgrade their images:

vagrant box update --box centos/6
vagrant box update --box centos/7

Verifying the integrity of the images

The SHA256 checksums of the images are signed with the CentOS 7 Official Signing Key. First, download and verify the checksum file:

$ curl http://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/sha256sum.txt.asc -o sha256sum.txt.asc
$ gpg --verify sha256sum.txt.asc

If the check passed, you can use the corresponding checksum when downloading the image with Vagrant:

$ vagrant box add --checksum-type sha256 --checksum aabcfe77a08b72bacbd6f05e5f26b67983b29314ee0039d0db4c9b28b4909fcd --provider libvirt --box-version 1705.01 centos/7

Unfortunately, vagrant box update doesn't accept a --checksum argument. Since there's no binary diffing involved in updating (the download size is the same, whether you have a previous version of the box or not), you can first issue vagrant box remove centos/7 and then download the box as described above.

Feedback

If you encounter any unexpected issues with the Vagrant images, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list, or via IRC, in #centos on Freenode.

Ackowledgements

We would like to warmly thank Fabian Arrotin and Thomas Oulevey for their work on the build infrastructure, as well as Patrick Lang from Microsoft for testing and feedback on the Hyper-V images.

We would also like to thank the following people (listed alphabetically):

• Graham Mainwaring, for helping with tests and validations
• Michael Vermaes, for testing our official images, as well as for writing the detailed guide to using them with VMware Fusion Pro and VMware Workstation Pro.