Explore the use of shared Vagrant boxes on infra-ibmcloud-vagrant-*

[Willsparker]

Last night, infra-ibmcloud-vagrant-x64-1" ran out of space. I have been able to rectify this with removing some vagrant boxes that go unused - however, they are so large, that it makes a lot more sense for them to be shared among all the vagrant users.

Vagrant doesn't inherently offer this: hashicorp/vagrant#8413
But it is suggested that it can be done by having symlinks. Alternatively, setting the VAGRANT_HOME variable.

I was able to test the latter - the user vagrant3 had access to the new Windows 10 vagrant box (ref: #1883 ), however user vagrant5 didn't. After running chown -R vagrant5 /home/vagrant3/.vagrant.d, and export VAGRANT_HOME=/home/vagrant3/.vagrant.d/, when running vagrant box list, the Win 10 box came up where it didn't before.

While this does work, the .vagrant.d file contains more than just the boxes, and so it may have some unintended consequences, especially if we're running VPC in parallel.

(ping @sxa ).

[sxa]

My only concern is that I'd be a little reluctant to completely shutdown the ability to run e.g. two windows VPCs in parallel if needed (Also, obviously, chown -R is not practical)

[Willsparker]

chown -R was really just a test to see if other users can pickup different user's boxes - If I were to look at this properly, I'd probably have a central directory where all users have read/write access - not unlike what we do with the QEMU images.

And, I'm not sure if this will cause that issue, really - theoretically, it'd be the equivalent to running 2 of the same VM as a single user, which I have certainly done on my local machine before. As I say, some testing will be required if someone was to look into this.