Chef is installed via the Ubuntu packages that they provide, instead of via RubyGems.The memory cgroup and swap accounting are turned on, for some Docker features.We use LVM so that partitioning is easier.So that you don’t have to worry about running out of disk space inside your VM. We provide a bigger virtual hard disk: around 40 GB.We provide 2 virtual CPUs by default, so that the boxes can make better use of multicore hosts.These boxes differ from the ones provided by in the following ways as well: Update April 23 2014: we now also provide Vagrant boxes based on Ubuntu 14.04. This makes provisioning a VM to be significantly more painful than it should be. Docker requires at least kernel 3.8, but all the Ubuntu 12.04 Vagrant boxes that we’ve encountered so far come with kernel 3.2 or 3.5, so that installing Docker on them requires a reboot. Today, we are releasing Docker-friendly Vagrant boxes based on Ubuntu 12.04. Googling for Vagrant and Docker will yield plenty of information and tutorials. Docker, while still young and not production-ready, is very promising and can make virtualization cheap and efficient. Instead we’d like to describe Docker as “FreeBSD jails for Linux + an ecosystem to make it a joy to use”. Docker officially describes it as “iPhone apps for your server”, but being the hardcore system-level guys that we are, we dislike this description. Lately we’ve been working with Docker, which is a cool new OS-level virtualization technology. It has proven to be an indispensable tool when working in development teams with more than 1 person, especially when not everybody uses the same operating system. Vagrant is a tool for easily setting up virtual machines as development environments, making it easy to distribute development environments and making them reconstructible and resetable.

We heavily utilize Vagrant in our development workflow.

Ubuntu vagrant box