What you need for this book

To use the recipes in this book, you will need:

• A development machine capable of running virtual machines with hypervisor software, such as VirtualBox (http://virtualbox.org) or VMware desktop products (http://vmware.com). You would want to get started with the freely available VirtualBox product and later on purchase the plugin to support VMware desktop products. Keep in mind that you will need a machine that is capable of running both your host operating system and also the guest operating systems that you will be creating with Vagrant. You will also want to ensure that you have enough storage (disk space) for virtual machine files. The disks created by Vagrant machines will typically be approximately the size required to operate the guest operating systems (approximately, 5-20 GB of disk space).
• If you plan on running 64-bit guests, you will also want to ensure that your processor is capable of Intel hardware virtualization (VT-x). In most cases, processors that support 64-bit operating systems already have this support built-in (with some exceptions, such as older Intel Celeron processors). See https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch10.html for more background on the requirements for hardware virtualization.
• Using cloud recipes (particularly, recipes involving Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean) will require accounts with cloud providers. Running the examples might incur charges to your account, so make sure that you understand the financial impacts of running the examples and how to ensure that all created instances have been stopped or terminated to avoid extra charges for the use of computational resources. The recipes in this book are not expensive to run, but they are also not free. Machines that are left running for a period of time could also end up costing more than you had planned on, so make sure that any instance created with Vagrant is eventually destroyed.