Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1809.01)

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):

• 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.