Provisioning in Kitchen with Vagrant and the Hyper-V Provider

Over the last year, I’ve primarily used Hyper-V as my driver for Kitchen in developing Chef cookbooks for Windows.  I’m now starting to branch out to build some cookbooks for Linux and really don’t want to build my own Hyper-V images.  So Vagrant is the obvious choice but I still use Hyper-V and don’t want to swap between VirtualBox and Hyper-V constantly.  Enabling Hyper-V disables other virtualization options like VirtualBox or VMWare on the same box.

Thankfully Vagrant also supports/provides a Hyper-V provider.

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/hyperv/

Vagrant is the default driver for Kitchen and uses VirtualBox for virtualization by default.  Kitchen can be configured to use Hyper-V with Vagrant but it isn’t documented very well.  Enter the community!  Michael T Lombardi, a PowerShell community member and Puppet employee, worked out the proper Kitchen configuration with the help of Matt Wrock in the following kitchen-vagrant issue:

https://github.com/test-kitchen/kitchen-vagrant/issues/297

Here is the final Kitchen.yml they ended up with:

driver:
  name: vagrant

provisioner:
  name: chef_zero
  always_update_cookbooks: true

verifier:
  name: inspec

transport:
  name: winrm
  elevated: true 
platforms:
  - name: Windows2012R2
    driver:
      box: mwrock/Windows2012R2
      provider: hyperv
      memory: 2048
      cpus: 2
      vm_hostname: chef-fu
      network:
        - ["private_network", {bridge: "Guest"}]
suites:
  - name: default
    run_list:
      - recipe[learn_chef_iis::default]
    verifier:
      inspec_tests:
        - test/recipes
    attributes:

Now we can use the vast registry of Vagrant boxes with Kitchen without sacrificing Hyper-V in the process.  I will be using Vagrant with Hyper-V going forward for all my Chef cookbook testing.

Few Additional Tips

Make sure you are using the latest kitchen-vagrant gem (currently version 1.2.1).  My memory and cpu configuration wasn’t being applied in Hyper-V until I upgraded this gem.

You can only use Vagrant boxes that support the Hyper-V provider.  You can easily filter your search to select providers on the Hashicorp Discover Vagrant Boxes page:

Join me in thanking Michael and Matt for their work on the Github issue so they know they are appreciated and will continue investing in the community.

Happy Testing!