I use vagrant a lot and at Zapier I use a setup where one Vagrantfile can be used to launch any instance in our infrastructure locally for testing. This is really quite useful as I can boot up a two node rabbitmq cluster with haproxy by simply typing vagrant up rabbitproxy01 rabbit01 rabbit02.
In the beginning this was a little messy as I just kept adding new node definitions and incrementing the ip address. But today I’ll share my refactored vagrant file for your own dynamic virtualizing goodness.
Essentially you just add your node names to nodes and when vagrant runs it will calculate a range of 10 host only ip addresses and node definitions for that node. So if you add “redis” to the list you can boot up redis01, redis02 … redis10.
Caveat: don’t just type vagrant up by itself or you’re going to have a bad time. This will essentially start bootstrapping many many vagrant boxes until your computer screams and falls over. Enjoy!