Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1809.01)

Thursday, 4, October 2018 Laurențiu Păncescu announcement 6 Comments

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 September 30th, 2018.

Notable Changes

  1. The images now use the ext4 filesystem, instead of XFS. We have been getting unbootable images due to XFS corruption over the last few months (the journal appears to be zeroed out, for reasons we do not yet understand). This is why we haven't had any monthly releases since May - I'm still looking into what happens.
  2. The images now use a single partition, swapping into a preallocated 2GB file. This makes resizing the partition and/or swap easier than it was before, with separate partitions inside LVM.
  3. The CentOS Linux 7 image comes with open-vm-tools preinstalled, enabling it to work with VMware ESXi.

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. 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
  4. Some people reported "could not resolve host" errors when running the centos/7 image for VirtualBox on Windows hosts. We don't have access to any Windows computer, but some people reported that adding the following line to the Vagrantfile fixed the problem:
    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 the 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 in #centos on Freenode IRC.

Ackowledgements

I would like to warmly thank Brian Stinson, 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. I would also like to thank the CentOS Project Lead, Karanbir Singh, without whose years of continuous support we wouldn't have had the Vagrant images in their present form.

I would also like to thank the following people (in alphabetical order):

6 thoughts on "Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1809.01)"

  1. Kevin says:

    Thanks for the update, but this seems to break applications that used to depend on libaio, which is supported by xfs. ext4 does not support asynchronous I/O. Do you have any recommendations for moving this back to the previous file system?

    1. I was basically forced to move from xfs to ext4 because all the xfs images I've built since April or May panicked at the beginning of the boot process due to filesystem corruption. I still haven't managed to find out why, but it happens every time when installing under a kvm hypervisor. The "choice" we had was between ext4 images and no images at all. I'll take another look now that 7.6 is released (an updated Vagrant image should come in the following days), but we can't return to xfs unless a solution or workaround is found.

  2. Pham Van Tuan says:

    user/password login into box ?

  3. Nick Price says:

    Since 4th December, I am no longer able to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions on this image using the vagrant-vbguest plugin.

    It appears that the kernel on this box is 3.1.0-862.14.4, so the plugin attempts to install the package kernel-devel-3.10.0-862.14.4.el7.x86_64

    However, this package is no longer available on the repositories included in this image! The closest matching package is kernel-devel-3.10.0-957.1.3.el7.x86_64, but the Guest Additions installation recognises that this doesn't match the kernel on the running system and refuses to use it.

    1. Akemi Yagi says:

      You can find the packages from CentOS 7.5 at :

      http://vault.centos.org/7.5.1804/updates/x86_64/Packages/ .

      However, please note that 7.5 is no longer supported. You may want to update the system to 7.6.1810.

    2. That's normal between a new point release and the release of new Vagrant images based on that (it would actually be avoidable if vagrant-vbguest would update and reboot the system before attempting to compile the VirtualBox kernel modules). I release new Vagrant images a few days ago, they should work with vagrant-vbguest.

Leave a Reply to Nick Price Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *