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0 pointsranger2072y ago0 comments

As someone who migrated our devs from local VMs to cloud VMs, I like it because despite the promise that every VM is the same, every dev laptop is not. There's so many ways for Vagrant and VirtualBox to screw up. Sure, the cloud VM is a little slower than local, but at least it fundamentally _works_, unlike VirtualBox where on any given day you might be suffering from any combination of 1) VirtualBox kexts not working on the latest version of MacOS, 2) file sharing silently breaking yet again with no logs, 3) docker containers inside the VM losing network connectivity for the third time this week because the bridge decided it didn't want to do anything, or 4) having VirtualBox installed just completely breaking MacOS and causing a crash during boot even after completely wiping, reloading, and trying to install VirtualBox again. Those are all real issues I spent weeks tearing my hair out over across dozens of devs. Now that we've moved to EC2-based VMs the only problems I have to deal with are minikube problems (which I had to deal with under VirtualBox as well) and when devs forgot they shut down their VM before going on vacation. The devs sometimes don't like that the default EBS volume is a little small, but every one that used the local VM knows it's a small price to pay

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5 comments · 2 top-level

tempodox2y ago· 3 in thread

Don't use VirtualBox. It's literally the shittiest VM you can choose.

mhitza2y ago

What other option do you have if you want to support developers across Linux/Mac/Windows?

VMWare player? Besides it not being OSS, I didn't notice any performance benefit.

The bottleneck (for my web development needs), is around the spottiness of shared folders and JS tooling that needs to keep a watch for file changes.

stephenr2y ago

If you're using vagrant to manage the VM and either use widely-supported or self built base boxes, each developer can use whichever works best on their platform.

So you might have a windows dev using hyperv, another usimg vmware workstation, a mac user with parallels, a linux user with lxc and another with kvm.

scarmig2y ago

Parallels always took that crown in my book, though I don't have that much experience with VirtualBox.

stephenr2y ago

> VirtualBox

Even HashiCorp know vbox is scraping the bottom of the barrel for hypervisors:

> if you are using Vagrant for any real work, VMware providers are recommended since they're well supported and generally more stable and performant than VirtualBox.

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