Vagrant for Automating Your Virtual Box

Vagrant creates and configures virtual development environments. It can be seen as a higher-level wrapper around virtualization software such as VirtualBox, VMware, KVM and Linux Containers (LXC), and around configuration management software such as Ansible, Chef, Salt and Puppet.

Vagrant is not just about creating VMs, it is about automating the work of setting up development environments for our projects. Also, we can check Vagrantfiles into source control with each project, so the environment is essentially stored with the code, without having to find a way to store a VM itself.

Install VirtualBox
sudo apt-get install virtualbox

Install Vagrant
sudo apt-get install vagrant

OR Install Vagrant from here
https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html

mkdir vagrant_test
cd vagrant_test
vagrant init

This will create a Vagrantfile. As said Vagrantfile is config file for the virtual machine.

Next download an image.
vagrant box add ubuntu/trusty64
you can browse for available boxes here : https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search

This stores the box under a specific name so that multiple Vagrant environments can re-use it. Just like VM templates

[Note : The syntax for the vagrant box add subcommand is changed with the version 1.5, due to the Vagrant Cloud introduction.
vagrant box add {title} {url}
http://www.vagrantbox.es/]

Next change your Vagrantfile contens as below.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
   config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
   config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "xxx.xxx.xx.xx"
   config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
     vb.cpus = 2
     vb.memory = "4096"
   end
end

Instead of using default box , we point config.vm.box to "ubuntu/trusty64" that we downloaded earlier.
config.vm.network : This allows to access any servers running on the box to be available to the network. You can configure public ip if you need.
Next , we set number of cpus 2 , also memory to 4GB.

Now bring up the box using following command
vagrant up

We can connect to the machine using
vagrant ssh

To destroy VM, we can use following command
vagrant destroy

Also note that vagrant halt will shut down the machine gracefully. And if you make any changes to Vagrantfile, to update the box we can use vagrant reload command.

How to profile JVM running on a remote server docker container.

On a Ubuntu desktop install JProfiler GUI from here.

Download script and run it.
http://download-keycdn.ej-technologies.com/jprofiler/jprofiler_linux_9_2.sh

Provide key if you have , else use evaluation.

Now on the Ubuntu server where docker container is running, you need to stop containers first and modify Dockerfile to add jprofiler

wget http://download-keycdn.ej-technologies.com/jprofiler/jprofiler_linux_9_2.tar.gz && \
tar -xzf jprofiler_linux_9_1_1.tar.gz -C /usr/local

Also expose the port 8849 from container to host so that you can connect from your desktop.

If you use docker-compose.yml, map the port in the service , which you want to connect.
For example

version: "2"
services:
  some_service:
    build: .
    ports:
      - "8849:8849"
    depends_on:
      - "db"
    entrypoint:


This will download jprofiler 9.2 and unpack it in /usr/local when you run docker container next time and map the port on host server.

Once docker container is up , you can ssh to it
docker exec -it /bin/bash
And just start the jprofiler using following command.
/usr/local/jprofiler9/bin/jpenable
You will be asked for 2 options , 1) GUI connect 2. Using config.xml

Use option 1 GUI connect
Now from Desktop you can open JProfiler UI and connect to server-ip:8849
You can profile the JVM you want.