windows-vagrant-boxes

Resources and guide to creating Windows vagrant base boxes for use with the vagrant-windows plugin

Prerequisites

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant
• The bindler plugin

vagrant plugin install bindler
vagrant bindler setup

Creating windows vagrant base boxes

To prepare a Windows VM for use as a vagrant base box

• Install windows in a VirtualBox VM with the following options
  • user: vagrant
  • password: vagrant
  • install only important updates
• Install important updates through windows update (restart many times)
• Ensure the following services are set to automatic from the Services panel
  • Base Filtering Engine
  • Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
  • DCOM Server Process Launcher
  • RPC Endpoint Mapper
  • Windows Firewall
• Run a command prompt as administrator and run the following to enable Windows Remote Management (WS-Management) with the correct settings

winrm quickconfig -q
winrm set winrm/config/winrs @{MaxMemoryPerShellMB="512"}
winrm set winrm/config @{MaxTimeoutms="1800000"}
winrm set winrm/config/service @{AllowUnencrypted="true"}
winrm set winrm/config/service/auth @{Basic="true"}
sc config WinRM start= auto

• Go to User Account Control Settings and select never notify to turn off UAC
• Go to Local Security Policy and under Security Settings/Account Policy/Password Policy disable the Password must meet complexity requirements option
• Restart the VM to ensure all settings have been applied
• Shut down the VM

To create the vagrant base box from this directory

vagrant package --vagrantfile Vagrantfile --base VM_NAME --output BOX_FILE

where:

• VM_NAME is the name of the VM in VirtualBox
• BOX_FILE is the name of the output file, eg. windows.box

Then to add the box to vagrant

vagrant box add BOX_NAME BOX_FILE

where

• BOX_NAME could be windows if the BOX_FILE was windows.box