Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com) is a tool similar to Apache Whirr in that it's designed to help provision virtual machine instances in an easy and repeatable manner. However, Whirr and Vagrant differ in a key way. While Whirr's primary purpose is to enable cloud-based provisioning, Vagrant focuses more on local virtualization with virtualization software such as VirtualBox and VMWare.

Vagrant supports several virtual machine providers, including VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org) and VMWare (http://www.vmware.com). In this chapter, we'll cover the use of Vagrant with VirtualBox since it is free and well supported by Vagrant.

Prior to using Vagrant, you must install a 4.x Version of VirtualBox (Vagrant does not yet support Version 5.x). We covered the VirtualBox installation in Chapter 2, Configuring Storm Clusters, and will not repeat those instructions here. Installing VirtualBox is largely just a matter of running an installer, but if you run into issues, please...