If all you have is a windows 10 machine, but if you have to build an automated configuration deployment with Ansible on a Linux machine, this small article comes to rescue. You can easily creade and destroy new infrastructure configurations on your local machine with Vagrant.

In the next steps I will describe how you can create virtual linux machines on a windows 10 system with Vagrant and then how you can access them to install Ansible and run a small setup configuration on them.

Prerequisites

1. Enabling Linux on Windows 10 is now wasy. You can check on this article for a detailed net to step approach: Linux on Windows 10

2. Install ubuntu bash: Ubuntu bash on Windows 10

3. Upgrade powershell to latest version: Powershell

4. Download and install Vagrant: Vagrantup

5. Install Ansible on Windows 10: Ansible

Setting up a Vagrant Configuration

1. Create a path on your local machine, where you would like to have the vagrant configuration. Make sure the path does not contain any space in the names. I took me a while to catch this limitation.

   Let’s say we work with: d:\vagrant\demo

2. Create a vagrant file: vagrantfile. The next script sample shows a configuration for two similar linux virtual machines, with 2 CPUs and 2 GB of Memory.

    #########################################################################
    ###### VM1 config #####################################################
    #########################################################################
    config.vm.define "vm1", primary: true do |vm1|
      vm1.vm.box = "centos/7"
           
      vm1.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.160.55.10"
   
      vm1.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
        # Don't boot with headless mode
        # vb.gui = true
             
        # Use VBoxManage to customize the VM. For example to change memory:
        vb.memory = 2048
        vb.cpus = 2
      end
    end
   
    #########################################################################
    ###### VM2 config ####################################################
    #########################################################################
    config.vm.define "vm2", autostart: false do |vm2|
      vm2.vm.box = "centos/7"
   
      vm2.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.160.55.20"
           
      vm2.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
        # Don't boot with headless mode
        # vb.gui = true
             
        # Use VBoxManage to customize the VM. For example to change memory:
        vb.memory = 2048
        vb.cpus = 2
      end
    end
   
   

3. For creating the virtual machines, the virtual up machine_name command has to be used As you can notice, the first machine configuration specifies that vm1 is the primary machine, this means that the machine_name can be skipped from the command.

   Therefore, start the cmd under admin rights and navigate to d:\vagrant\demo path where the vagrantfile can be found

   For creating the first machine, execute:

   $ vagrant up
   

   For creating the second machine, execute:

   $ vagrant up vm2
   

4. Enable ssh-agent in bash

   $ ssh-agent bash
   

5. Enable ssh communication to the vagrant machine by adding the private key generated by vagrant for each machine

   $ ssh-add /mnt/d/vagrant/demo/.vagrant/machines/vm1/virtualbox/private_key
   $ ssh-add /mnt/d/vagrant/demo/.vagrant/machines/vm2/virtualbox/private_key
   

6. Check the connections to each machine by using the IPs added in the vagrantfile configuration:

   $ ssh vagrant@192.160.55.10
   $ ssh vagrant@192.160.55.20
   

7. Now you can execute your Ansible configuration setup on the above created machines. In the next article I will post a detailed step by step sample on how to do this.

8. If you want to start from scratch, you can delete the vagrant machines by using the destroy command

   $ vagrant destroy vm1
   $ vagrant destroy vm2
   

Other Good References

Ansible Docs

Dev Docs

That’s it! Now you are good to go!