Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1801.01)

We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.9 and CentOS Linux 7.4.1708 for x86_64 (based on the sources of RHEL 7.4). All included packages have been updated to 9 January 2017 and include important fixes for the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affecting modern processors.

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).
9. Some people reported "could not resolve host" errors when running the centos/7 image for VirtualBox on Windows hosts. Try adding the following line to your Vagrantfile:

   vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "off"]

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.

Downloads

The official images can be downloaded from Vagrant Cloud. We provide images for HyperV, 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:

$ export box_checksum="4440a10744855ec2819d726074958ad6cff56bb5a616f6a45b0a42d602aa1154"
$ vagrant box add --checksum-type sha256 --checksum $box_checksum --provider libvirt --box-version 1801.02 centos/7

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;
• Kirill Kalachev, for reporting and debugging the host name errors with VirtualBox on Windows hosts.

Update : this blog post was updated on January Wednesday 24th to reflect different checksum as the image to use is 1801_02