Adding Metadata to the Arista vEOS Vagrant Box
This post addresses a (mostly) cosmetic issue with the current way that Arista distributes its Vagrant box for vEOS. I say “mostly cosmetic” because while the Vagrant box for vEOS is perfectly functional if you use it via Arista’s instructions, adding metadata as I explain here provides a small bit of additional flexibility should you need multiple versions of the vEOS box on your system.
If you follow Arista’s instructions, then you’ll end up with something like this when you run vagrant box list:
arista-veos-4.18.0 (virtualbox, 0)
bento/ubuntu-16.04 (virtualbox, 2.3.1)
centos/6 (virtualbox, 1611.01)
centos/7 (virtualbox, 1611.01)
centos/atomic-host (virtualbox, 7.20170131)
coreos-stable (virtualbox, 1235.9.0)
debian/jessie64 (virtualbox, 8.7.0)
Note that the version of the vEOS box is embedded in the name. Now, you could not put the version in the name, but because there’s no metadata—which is why it shows (virtualbox, 0) on that line—you wouldn’t have any way of knowing which version you had. Further, what happens when you want to have multiple versions of the vEOS box?
Fortunately, there’s an easy fix (inspired by the way CoreOS distributes their Vagrant box). Just create a file with the Continue reading
The public cloud is taking its toll.