What does it mean to provision a virtual machine?

Question

I see the word "provisioning" used everywhere with virtualization but I can't seem to find a clear definition of it on google. Does it involve just setting up the guest operating system and allotting resources to it, or does it include downloading software and updates as well? Or does it include even more than that, like setting up shared folders and configurations?

Answer 1

Definitions and Examples

From the definition of Puppet:

Puppet is a configuration management system that allows you to define the state of your IT infrastructure, then automatically enforces the correct state.

Vagrant allows you to use provisioners like shell scripts, Puppet, Chef, or Ansible to configure your machine as part of the provisioning process:

Provisioners in Vagrant allow you to automatically install software, alter configurations, and more on the machine as part of the vagrant up process.

In general, if you want to automate the setup or configuration of a node, virtual or not, then a configuration management tool that supports hardware and/or OS provisioning is what you need.

Answer 2

Provisioning generally means a functional state - something past a vanilla server creation.

A typical example is: Provision a web server or provision 20 web servers. In practice that means: - Create 20 servers. - Install packages necessary to serve up web traffic - Possibly create a load balancer - (maybe) Join all of these boxes to a load balancer

Example of said via Chef Provisioning (from:https://github.com/vinyar/tokyo_chef_provisioning)

## Setting up empty array
elb_instances = []

## Generic name
name = 'stack_example'

## machine_batch allows parallel creation of machines
machine_batch 'hello_world' do
  1.upto(20) do |n|
    ## Just a variable to make things easier
    instance = "#{name}-webserver-#{n}"
    ## Machine resource is used to create a single server
    machine instance do
      machine_options ({
        bootstrap_options: { 
          :instance_type => "t1.micro",
          image_id: 'ami-b6bdde86',
          :key_name => "stack_key"},
        :ssh_username => "root"})
      recipe "webserver"
      tag "#{name}-webserver"
      converge true
    end
    ## Populating array with instance name on each loop.
    elb_instances << instance
  end
end

## Creating load balancer
load_balancer "#{name}-webserver-lb" do
  load_balancer_options({
    :availability_zones => ["us-west-2a", "us-west-2b", "us-west-2c"],
    :listeners => [{:port => 80, :protocol => :http, :instance_port => 80, :instance_protocol => :http }],
  })
  ## Passing array as a list of machines to the load balancer
  machines elb_instances
end