We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.9 and CentOS Linux 7.5.1804 for x86_64 (based on the sources of RHEL 7.5). All included packages have been updated to 12th May 2018.
Notable Changes
The IO scheduler is now set to noop, according to Red Hat recommendations.
Known Issues
- 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.
- 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".
- Vagrant 1.8.5 is unable to create new CentOS Linux boxes due to Vagrant bug #7610
- Vagrant 1.8.7 is unable to download or update boxes due to Vagrant bug #7969.
- Vagrant 1.9.1 broke private networking, see Vagrant bug #8166
- Vagrant 1.9.3 doesn't work with SMB sync due to Vagrant bug #8404
- The vagrant-libvirt plugin is only compatible with Vagrant 1.5 to 1.8
- 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).
- 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
Once you are sure that the checksums are properly signed by the CentOS Project, you have to include them in your Vagrantfile (Vagrant unfortunately ignores checksum provided from the command line). Here's the relevant snippet from my own Vagrantfile, using v1803.01 and VirtualBox:
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
config.vm.box = "centos/7"
config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |virtualbox, override|
virtualbox.memory = 1024
override.vm.box_download_checksum_type = "sha256"
override.vm.box_download_checksum = "b24c912b136d2aa9b7b94fc2689b2001c8d04280cf25983123e45b6a52693fb3"
override.vm.box_url = "https://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-Vagrant-1803_01.VirtualBox.box"
end
end
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.
Using the 1804_02 with vagrant seems impossible right now, because the download from vagrantcloud.com ultimately points to https://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-Vagrant-18041_02.VirtualBox.box which does not exist (note the "18041" instead of "1804").
does somebody fix th broken URL which Carlos Rodrigues mentioned below?
https://vagrantcloud.com/centos/boxes/7/versions/1804.02/providers/virtualbox.box
redirects to wrong url
https://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-Vagrant-18041_02.VirtualBox.box
which results 404 error.
Correct one will be:
https://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-Vagrant-1804_02.VirtualBox.box
+1
I don't know this should be fixed by Vagrant team or CentOS, I wrote an email to support+vagrantcloud@hashicorp.com.
I guess it could be fixed by either - CentOS could add a redirect from the bad URL to the good one (unless vagrant itself refuses to follow the redirect), or Vagrant could change the URL.
This was fixed today at some point. Working as of 2018-05-21. Thanks kbsingh!
+1 same problem here.
You are being redirected.
Which doesn't exists.
Any update to this fix?
Awesome boxes, this is really helpful for command line workflows! Could we get boxes published for the alternate (x86 / i386) editions as well?
I personally find the x86 edition less useful than x86-64, since EPEL is only available for the latter. If more users express interest in the 32-bit edition, I'll consider it (you are the first one to express interest in that).
Given the "known issues" list is as long as my arm and manages to affect just about every install combination is this genuinely considered fit for purpose?
Since centos/7 is the fourth most downloaded Vagrant image on app.vagrantup.com, with around 4.7 million downloads, I'd assume at least some people consider the official images "fit for purpose" (whatever that's supposed to mean) and use them. I use them myself, too.
If you go through the list of known issues, none of them are actual bugs in our images; most of them are bugs in older versions of Vagrant or VirtualBox for Windows. We can only report the bugs upstream and inform our users in the release notes, to avoid being flooded with bug reports about things we are in no position to fix. Nevertheless, most people using our images on Mac, current Linux distros or even Windows (with the workarounds from "Known issues") won't experience any problems.
It would be nice if cifs-utils were be pre-installed
That would probably make sense for our Windows users, I'll add it to future images. Thanks for the suggestion!
thank you!
I'm interested to see how the box is created.
Are you using packer?
Could someone point me to the source repository?
We can't use Packer because the images are built on CentOS infrastructure (without any access to the Internet for getting additional packages - only official CentOS packages and repos are allowed), and they need to be reproducible. We use Image Factory, with a plugin for Koji. That's probably overkill if you intend to build your own images; take a look at the vbox-packer branch of https://github.com/lpancescu/sig-cloud-instance-build if you would like to use Packer to build your own CentOS images based on the official ones (I usually merge the relevant changes from the main branch after the monthly release).
Is it possible to include cifs-utils at least in hyperv box? Since I think without one it fails to mount SMB shares for Hyperv. And it's a terrible pain to preinstall them all the time. Thank you
"Failed to mount folders in Linux guest. This is usually because
the "vboxsf" file system is not available. Please verify that
the guest additions are properly installed in the guest and
can work properly. The command attempted was:
mount -t cifs -o sec=ntlmssp,credentials=/etc/smb_creds_vgt-635c1930e8a2d60ea9cc2ce4232f3a04-6ad5fdbcbf2eaa93bd62f92333a
2e6e5,uid=1000,gid=1000 //192.168.1.107/vgt-635c1930e8a2d60ea9cc2ce4232f3a04-6ad5fdbcbf2eaa93bd62f92333a2e6e5 /vagrant
The error output from the last command was:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //192.168.1.107/vgt-635c1930e8a2d60ea9cc2ce4232f3a04-6ad5fdbcbf2eaa93bd62f92333a2e6e5,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
(for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might
need a /sbin/mount. helper program)
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so."
thats a good point, however at the moment we build the images from the same kickstart. Take a look here : https://github.com/CentOS/sig-cloud-instance-build/tree/master/vagrant - if you are able to a Pull Request to maybe branch for the HyperV image, and we can build it that way.
On the other hand, maybe try hitting up the centos-devel list ( https://lists.centos.org/ ) and see if there is interest in having cifs-utils might be suiteable for all images,
I would like to add cifs-utils to all images for the next release, since smb is probably the best choice for sharing folders on Windows.
On the CentOS 6 box when trying to use private networking, I always get an error saying:
"Error, some other host (08:00:27:0D:C5:20) already uses address 192.168.56.87."
This happens with any IP address I try to use. Any thoughts on how to fix this?
I attempted to use this image with vagrant-vmware-esxi plugin and it fails to detect the machine as running so it never completes the build, to resolve I had to login manually via the ESXi web interface so I could install and start open-vm-tools.
I think the VMWare boxes should contain open-vm-tools by default.