Before we can start with this example, we'll have to assume that you have purchased and installed the VMware Desktop product for your platform: Fusion for OS X, Workstation for Windows or Linux. These products can be purchased from a number of retailers or directly from VMware (http://www.vmware.com).

With VMware installed, we'll have to obtain a copy of the Vagrant provider directly from HashiCorp. At the time of writing this book, the plugin is not available through third parties. You can purchase the VMware plugin at http://vagrantup.com/vmware.

Once you have paid for the plugin, HashiCorp will send an e-mail with the download instructions and some basic instructions on how to install the provider. We'll walk through this installation in this recipe.

Vagrant providers rely on Vagrant's plugin capability—the ability to extend Vagrant through the Ruby environment. To install the plugin, open a command-line environment and execute Vagrant with the plugin command.

In this example, we'll install the VMware Fusion plugin, although the plugin installation will be similar for any number of providers. (See https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/wiki/Available-Vagrant-Plugins for a relatively up-to-date listing of maintained plugins.)

This example installed a new bit of functionality within Vagrant; the expanded functionality of plugins allows Vagrant to manage different virtual environments with an identical API. In general, Vagrant plugins can be used to extend Vagrant in a number of different ways—providers are

You might have noticed that the only difference in starting the Vagrant environment from the previous recipe was the use of the provider option when starting the machine. If you want to ensure that a virtual machine always uses a specific provider when starting, set the VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=vmware_fusion environment variable.

Setting an environment variable depends on your system and terminal shell in a Unix- based system (OS X, Linux); you might set this variable in your login shell profile (either .bash_profile or .bashrc), and for Microsoft Windows, this variable is set in the Environment Variables... dialog. Consult the documentation for your platform on how to create system variables.

With a VMware Desktop plugin installed, you can use VMware to manage virtual environments, whereas with other plugins, we can also use Vagrant to manage virtual machines locally with other hypervisors (for example, Parallels on OS X) or even in remote hypervisors (for example, VMware ESXi environments, Amazon Web Services). We'll see examples on how to use Vagrant in these environments in later recipes in the book.