Few things to take care while building vagrant boxes

Following are some of the tricks that were useful to me while creating Oracle Enterprise Linux vagrant box.
Create vm using VDI format for easy handling.
Make sure you have removed all the extraneous packages from the installed vm.
You can check out package descriptions at pkgs.org. 

yum remove X11
yum list installed | grep gnome

Also ensure that yum installs only relevant language support

Edit /etc/rpm/macros.lang and include
%_install_langs en:fr

Creating base box from scratch for Vagrant

At vagrantbox.es, you can find boxes for many flavours like CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian etc.

How ever, you might require a flavour of OS that is not available packaged for you already.
In such a case, you might want to package it for use with Vagrant.
I needed Oracle Enterprise Linux Box.

Following is a step by step approach to create a base box for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.7 64 bit version.


Creating a VM on VirtualBox

Step 1: Get the ISO file from which we will install the Oracle Enterprise Linux.

Step 2: Create your virtual machine on VirtualBox.

  Create a new Virtual Machine 
      Type: VMDK
      Name : oel57
      Base memory size: 512 MB, Memory Space Maximum 40 GB
      Enable Host I/O cache

Using Vagrant

Vagrant is a great tool for creating vm at whim and tearing it down so that you could start all over again. It helps to start from a clean state, when you are trying to test deployment and setups. Vagrant requires VirtualBox and is written in Ruby.

Following is a step by step take down on how to setup and use vagrant on Mac

Ubantu on Mac OSX using VirtualBox

I installed ubantu on mac osx using VirtualBox some time back. Installation went fairly easy except for the fact that I had to look out for increasing the resolution from the default 800X600.

Here is an step by step approach to install and use VirtualBox.