| If you have an elaborate VM management system already set up that you can use on all production and development machines - by any means, use it. If not, Vagrant provides you with the following in development mode: * A way to package virtual machines and shift them between machines, probably with different OSes. At our company "could you pack that up and send it" is the new "can you show me this error on my machine"? * An easy way to track machine configurations in your version control system. * It has integration into all major provisioning tools, so you can possibly reuse your production environments scripts. * It cares to configure a lot of details, e.g. forwarding the ssh agent so that not every developer has to care for that. * A plugin API to build additions independent from the underlying virtualizer (only VirtualBox at the moment, but more in the future), e.g. https://github.com/BerlinVagrant/vagrant-dns (but in that case, sadly not independent of the host os)[1] And all that, without home-baking. [1]: Shameless plug: I need help for Linux and Windows |