Vagrant / Oracle Virtual box / both host os and guest os are windows 7

Question

We have a project it is based on Java 1.7, spring, hibernate. The development environment has many steps to install. So we decide to use Vagrant so that developer do no need to take time to setup developing environment. Our host OS normally is windows 7. And we would like to have our Virtual box Guest OS as windows 7 also since our developer are most familiar with windows OS. (Of course, we could switch to Linux). We could not find guest OS image (Guest OS: windows image for virtual box, 64 bit). Is guest OS of windows for virtual box commerical or do someone could point me the link for download?

Answer 1

Windows VMs can be a bit tricky, due to the licensing issues of it being non-free software.

Microsoft issues a set of VMs for situations such as yours, which can be found here: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/windows/

For your situation, it may be beneficial to create the machine once manually, and package it as a vagrant box and then distribute it to your dev team.

More information on this can be found in the Vagrant documentation: https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/virtualbox/boxes.html - "PACKAGING THE BOX"

(copied below for posterity)

PACKAGING THE BOX

Vagrant includes a simple way to package VirtualBox base boxes. Once you've installed all the software you want to install, you can run this command:

$ vagrant package --base my-virtual-machine

Where "my-virtual-machine" is replaced by the name of the virtual machine in VirtualBox to package as a base box.

It will take a few minutes, but after it is complete, a file "package.box" should be in your working directory which is the new base box. At this point, you've successfully created a base box!