#Setup

Have virtualbox 4.1.20r80170 installed.

Have an ssh daemon with passwordless login to localhost (i.e. “ssh [me]@localhost” must work without password). To achieve that, be sure you have your ssh public key (at System.getProperty(“user.home”) + “/.ssh/id_rsa”) in your ‘.ssh/authorized_keys’. Please look at [this example]http://www.linuxproblem.org/art_9.html for more details.

You can have also specify ‘-Dvirtualbox.identity’ and ‘-Dvirtualbox.credential’ if you want to use a username and password of your local machine.

In order to make available a preseed file, jclouds-vbox will start a PreseedServer at http://localhost:23232 that will serve a preseed.cfg file. Make sure your firewall rules are not blocking this port. If you need to override this default you can use -Djclouds.virtualbox.preconfigurationurl=http://localhost:PORT/preseed.cfg, with a different PORT.

That's it!

#Running a local cloud

Enjoy local cloud goodness by running:

“mvn clean install clojure:repl”

(use 'org.jclouds.compute2)
(import 'org.jclouds.scriptbuilder.statements.login.AdminAccess)
(def compute (compute-service “virtualbox” “user” “password” :sshj :slf4j))
(create-nodes compute “local-cluster” 2 (build-template compute { :run-script (AdminAccess/standard) } ))

#Interacting with jclouds-vbox and connecting to machines

For java guidance look into src/test/java/org/jclouds/virtualbox/compute/VirtualBoxExperimentLiveTest.java.
For now nat+host-only is the only available network configuration, nodes should be accessible from the host by:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa -o “UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null” -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no me@192.168.86.X

where X is the node index with regard to creation order starting at 2 (2,3,4, etc...)

It should behave as any other provider, if not please report.

#Notes:

• jclouds-vbox is still at alpha stage please report any issues you find.
• jclouds-vbox has been mostly tested on Mac OSX, it might work on Linux iff vbox is running and correctly set up, but it won't work on windows for the moment.
• cached isos, vm's and most configs are kept at ~/.jclouds-vbox/ by default, you can override -Dtest.virtualbox.workingDir=/path/to/your/workingDir.
• jclouds-vbox assumes vbox has the default host-only network vboxnet0, that the network is in 192.168.86.0/255.255.255.0 and that the host has address 1 in this network.

#Throubleshooting

As jclouds vbox support is quite new things might go wrong sometimes. The procedure to make things work again is the following:

1. Remove all relevant vm's (named "jclouds-* ") with the vbox GUI. Make sure to select “delete all files”.

• Step one should be enough most of the times, but if it fails (by throwing some error):

2. kill all vbox processes (VboxHadless, VBoxSVC, VBoxXPCOMIPCD, VirtualBox, vboxwebsrv)
3. delete manually the files by executing: “rm -rf ~/.jclouds-vbox/jclouds-*”
4. restart the vbox GUI and make sure to delete all remaining machines ignoring all errors.