Using vagrant and chef to setup a Windows VM in Ubuntu

Question

I'm running Ubuntu and I want to setup a VM in Virtualbox via Vagrant and Chef. I think what I'm missing is a .box for the Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 trial I have.

Does anyone know where I could find a .box? If not, how would I go about building a Vagrant .box for Windows Server 2008?

Solution 1

I recently had to build a Vagrant .box for Windows Server 2008 R2 using Chef provisioning. I blogged about my experiences here. As Henk mentioned, you'll first need to create the basebox using a veewee template. I recommend using the windows-2008R2-serverstandard-amd64-winrm template.

Solution 2

Distributing a .box with Windows would be illegal. Public / free boxes however can be found on the site Vagrantbox.es

You could try and build your own box with veewee. The author of veewee shows in this video how he built a Windows7 box: veewee does windows7, so Windows Server 2k8 might be possible too, since there are templates available from within veewee:

# veewee templates
... snip ...
vagrant basebox define '<boxname>' 'windows-2008R1-serverstandard-amd64'
vagrant basebox define '<boxname>' 'windows-2008R2-amd64'
vagrant basebox define '<boxname>' 'windows-2008R2-serverstandard-amd64'

You'll also need a W2k8 DVD or ISO-image of course.

Comments

[Henk]

Right. But instead of veewee, I would use Packer (packer.io) these days.

[Redsandro]

Would (re)distributing a box based on an evaluation version (such as the ones offered by Microsoft at Modern.IE) also be illegal?