Vagrant setup to create a local docker lab (for Swarm)

In order to test locally some swarm cluster features, I created this repo to ease a docker swarm cluster creation and deletion with virtual machines.

Requirements

Host packages requirements

The host must have :

• Git to clone this repository (you can download and unzip too)
• Vagrant to handle virtual machines
• VirtualBox as Hypervisor
• Ansible for provisionning

Host system requirements

• OS : Linux I use pop OS 21.10
• CPUs number : 8 (at least)
• RAM : 8GB (at least)
• Free disk space : about 75GB...

Notes: I use virtualbox as virtual machine hypervisor.

As I have disk space limitations on my desktop, I did the following setup via CLI to use my external drive as a disk space extension:

# Check the current default path for the VMs
vboxmanage list systemproperties | grep 'Default machine folder'

# Set a new path for the VMs to be created.
# Check the external drive(s) mount path with `df -h` or `fdik -l`
vboxmanage setproperty machinefolder <path/to/the/external_drive>

# Ensure that the new setting is applied
vboxmanage list systemproperties | grep 'Default machine folder'

Clone the repo

# Clone the repo and change directory
git clone [email protected]:thkevin/vagrant_swarm_vms.git

# Get into the project directory
cd vagrant_swarm_vms

Create the cluster nodes

# Vagrant up!
vagrant up

Access a node in the cluster

# To connect with one of the nodes, use the names manager1, worker2, worker3
# Example 1
vagrant ssh worker-2

# Example 2
vagrant ssh manager-1

Setup the swarm cluster

I didn't set up the swarm cluster during the provisionning for learning purposes.

I think that the user should start from the beginning and create it himself with docker swarm init and docker swarm join commands.

However, you can uncomment the line ansible.tags = "swarm" in the ansible provisioner section in the Vagrantfile to automate the cluster setup during ansible provisioning.

Destroy the cluster

This command will power off and destroy all the virtual machines of the cluster.

vagrant destroy [-f]