We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.9 and CentOS Linux 7.5.1804 for x86_64 (based on the sources of RHEL 7.5). All included packages have been updated to September 30th, 2018.
The images now use the ext4 filesystem, instead of XFS. We have been getting unbootable images due to XFS corruption over the last few months (the journal appears to be zeroed out, for reasons we do not yet understand). This is why we haven't had any monthly releases since May - I'm still looking into what happens.
The images now use a single partition, swapping into a preallocated 2GB file. This makes resizing the partition and/or swap easier than it was before, with separate partitions inside LVM.
The CentOS Linux 7 image comes with open-vm-tools preinstalled, enabling it to work with VMware ESXi.
We recommend using NFS instead of VirtualBox shared folders if possible; you can also use the vagrant-sshfs plugin, which, unlike NFS, works on all operating systems.
to their Vagrantfile, to prevent errors on "vagrant up".
Our automatic testing is running on a CentOS Linux 7 host, using Vagrant 1.9.4 with vagrant-libvirt and VirtualBox 5.1.20 (without the Guest Additions) as providers. We strongly recommend using the libvirt provider when stability is required.
The official images can be downloaded from Vagrant Cloud. We provide images for HyperV, libvirt-kvm, VirtualBox and VMware.
If you encounter any unexpected issues with the Vagrant images, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list, or in #centos on Freenode IRC.
I would like to warmly thank Brian Stinson, Fabian Arrotin and Thomas Oulevey for their work on the build infrastructure, as well as Patrick Lang from Microsoft for testing and feedback on the Hyper-V images. I would also like to thank the CentOS Project Lead, Karanbir Singh, without whose years of continuous support we wouldn't have had the Vagrant images in their present form.
Kirill Kalachev, for reporting and debugging the host name errors with VirtualBox on Windows hosts.
Thanks for the update, but this seems to break applications that used to depend on libaio, which is supported by xfs. ext4 does not support asynchronous I/O. Do you have any recommendations for moving this back to the previous file system?
I was basically forced to move from xfs to ext4 because all the xfs images I've built since April or May panicked at the beginning of the boot process due to filesystem corruption. I still haven't managed to find out why, but it happens every time when installing under a kvm hypervisor. The "choice" we had was between ext4 images and no images at all. I'll take another look now that 7.6 is released (an updated Vagrant image should come in the following days), but we can't return to xfs unless a solution or workaround is found.
user/password login into box ?
Since 4th December, I am no longer able to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions on this image using the vagrant-vbguest plugin.
However, this package is no longer available on the repositories included in this image! The closest matching package is kernel-devel-3.10.0-957.1.3.el7.x86_64, but the Guest Additions installation recognises that this doesn't match the kernel on the running system and refuses to use it.
However, please note that 7.5 is no longer supported. You may want to update the system to 7.6.1810.
That's normal between a new point release and the release of new Vagrant images based on that (it would actually be avoidable if vagrant-vbguest would update and reboot the system before attempting to compile the VirtualBox kernel modules). I release new Vagrant images a few days ago, they should work with vagrant-vbguest.