Vagrant and Hyper-V Provides Managed DevOps Work Environments
Vagrant managed work environments can be controlled by a single, consistent workflow, to help you maximize the productivity and flexibility of your team. Alongside industry-standard provisioning tools such as shell scripts, Chef, or Puppet, Vagrant supports a range of end-to-end management and deployment scenarios to create a single, consistent workflow that spans your entire team:
Developers can define and build virtual machines (VMs) that contain everything required to get work done. These VMs are disposable and consistent and thus ensure that you, and all your colleagues, are developing in the same environment. As the Vagrant documentation points out this means you can say goodbye to "works on my machine" bugs.
Operations engineers can use these same disposable environments and consistent workflows to develop and test infrastructure management scripts. Vagrant plays well with whatever operations tooling you use. When that tooling is designed for interoperability between platforms, such as Chef and Puppet, Vagrant really sets the operations team free.
Designers can use Vagrant to ensure that they are working in the exact same environment as the rest of their team, regardless of their chosen host operating system. Designers can run a simple command to bring up the latest configuration and thus will no longer be working in an environment that differs from the development or deployment environments used by the rest of their teams.
The Vagrant community has been asking for Hyper-V support for some time, in hopes of extending the experience across a heterogeneous platform environment. MS Open Tech are working with the Vagrant project to further enhance this work, specifically we are working on packaging, provisioning shell, and Chef & Puppet bootstrapping.
We encourage interested parties to get their hands on the Vagrant Hyper-V provider, play with it, examine it and provide us with feedback!