| Vagrant is a little bit different - it takes the process of booting up a new VM instance (think VirtualBox/VMWare) and automates much of the process of: 1. Choosing OS / flavor / architecture (Debian 7 x64), 2. Setting up networking (private network with its own IP address), 3. Setting up SSH access ($ vagrant ssh), 4. Kicking off provisioning (Chef/Puppet/Salt/Ansible/Bash) With Vagrant, if you're playing around in your VM and accidently screw something up and can't recover [0], you simply "$ vagrant destroy" and "$ vagrant up" and you'll have a working VM again. Couple Vagrant with Puppet, and if you destroy/up you'll have your VM go through the process of installing all software and settings and everything for you, meaning your full, working environment is back up and running within minutes, just as it was before you screwed it up. [0] I experienced this several times when my apt-get stuff would screw up and I couldn't install/remove/purge anything. Google and #debian never let me recover. |