Saltcloud virtualbox provider

[LoveIsGrief]

Hello everybody,

For those of us that don't have a cloud provider available, it would be nice to provision VirtualBox machines. This would come in handy to e.g test saltcloud before going live (my case) or simply having an environment on one machine.

As the guidelines says I'm asking for this before starting implementation as I haven't seen this implemented yet.

I'm looking forward to comments, suggestions and whatnot e.g if this fits in the philosophy of saltcloud.

Cheers

[p-hennessy]

I usually use Vagrant spin up virtual machines, perhaps that would work for you?

[LoveIsGrief]

As far as I understand that would be if saltcloud were't being used. If I'd want to use Saltcloud locally, it wouldn't be possible. It doesn't seem to have a vagrant or virtualbox provider in order to manage VMs.

[jfindlay]

@LoveIsGrief, thanks for the report. I think the typical salt approach with VM management software like virtualbox or qemu is to handle them with execution and state modules. You may be able to get at least some of what you need by using the vbox_guest modules. It doesn't look like they yet support full virtualbox functionality.

[LoveIsGrief]

Hi @jfindlay

I was looking for the ability to call salt-cloud --list-providers and see virtualbox in the output. Of course with the same functionality as other providers e.g. define a provider config for virtualbox (for a local virtualbox hypervisor as well as a remote one) and profiles to later call create VMs according to these profiles.

The goal behind all this is be able to cheaply test a salt and salt-cloud configuration locally before pushing everything to different environments without the need for AWS, Azure, linode or any of the other providers.

Don't know if anybody else has started implementing the salt-cloud plugin but I have in LoveIsGrief/saltcloud-virtualbox-provider

[jfindlay]

@LoveIsGrief, from what I understand, that means you have virtualbox configured somewhere under /etc/salt/cloud.providers.d/ even though salt-cloud does not support it yet. I am looking forward to your pull request though. :-)

[DanyC97]

@jfindlay i'm curious - how you guys test salt-cloud ? i find it very hard to test it w/o having a virtualbox provider (every other provider adds additional dependencies/ costs)

[LoveIsGrief]

That's exactly what I'm struggling with right now. I have only been able to do manual tests of salt-cloud. Still trying to find a way to write proper unit tests.

[rallytime]

@DanyC97 and @LoveIsGrief We need to write more unit tests for salt cloud. Those should be easy to add to the test suite as they should be using mock data to test against.

We have some integration tests that run nightly on our Jenkins installation. These run on a nightly basis because of the cost factors you're describing. The code for these tests is located in salt/tests/integration/cloud/providers/ if you want to see how we're doing it.

[DanyC97]

@rallytime thanks for feedback, appreciated!
However i hope you guys won't give up on vbox driver :)

[rallytime]

Nope! Still a great feature request. We just haven't had time to tackle too many features since we're working on getting the bug count down first.

[DanyC97]

@rallytime fair point

[rallytime]

The virtualbox cloud driver was added a couple of months ago:
https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/develop/salt/cloud/clouds/virtualbox.py