I don't use Vagrant, but it is on my radar. I have a manual virtualbox setup and a few shell aliases that enable me to quickly boot/shutdown virtual environments I need. To anyone who wants to do the same, read a bit about VBoxManage [0]. You can do a lot to manage virtual machines on virtualbox through it.
That said, the nice thing Vagrant brings to the table is it supports multiple providers. I can't seem to see a solid listing of which in their documentation, but they mention by name at least virtualbox, vmware, and AWS. The use of a Vagrant file to configure a new machine is also nice. You can get similar behaviour with Chef/Puppet, or as I do scp in a shell script file and run it.
So, what excites me most about projects like Vagrant and Docker getting popular is that I hate flailing around with build dependencies. I was amazed with apt-get build-dep the first time I used it, but even that has let me down a few times in the past. It's much better than it used to be, but all I want for Christmas is every project to provide a easy to access environment I can grab and build their project with. We seem to be getting closer and closer to this being provided by default, instead of an exceptional circumstance.
That said, the nice thing Vagrant brings to the table is it supports multiple providers. I can't seem to see a solid listing of which in their documentation, but they mention by name at least virtualbox, vmware, and AWS. The use of a Vagrant file to configure a new machine is also nice. You can get similar behaviour with Chef/Puppet, or as I do scp in a shell script file and run it.
So, what excites me most about projects like Vagrant and Docker getting popular is that I hate flailing around with build dependencies. I was amazed with apt-get build-dep the first time I used it, but even that has let me down a few times in the past. It's much better than it used to be, but all I want for Christmas is every project to provide a easy to access environment I can grab and build their project with. We seem to be getting closer and closer to this being provided by default, instead of an exceptional circumstance.
[0] http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html