Basic Usage

This feature currently reqiures the experimental flag to be used. To explicitly enable this feature, you can set the experimental flag to:

VAGRANT_EXPERIMENTAL="disks"

Please note that VAGRANT_EXPERIMENTAL is an environment variable. For more information about this flag visit the Experimental docs page for more info. Without this flag enabled, any disks defined will not be configured.

Below are some very simple examples of how to use Vagrant Disks with the VirtualBox provider.

Basic Examples

Resizing your primary disk

Sometimes, the primary disk for a guest is not large enough and you will need to add more space. To resize a disk, you can simply add a config like this below to expand the size of your guests drive:

config.vm.disk :disk, size: "100GB", primary: true

Note: the primary: true is what tells Vagrant to expand the guests main drive. Without this option, Vagrant will instead attach a new disk to the guest.

For example, this Ubuntu guest will now come with 100GB of space, rather than the default:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.define "hashicorp" do |h|
    h.vm.box = "hashicorp/bionic64"
    h.vm.provider :virtualbox

    h.vm.disk :disk, size: "100GB", primary: true
  end
end

It should be noted that due to how VirtualBox functions, it is not possible to shrink the size of a disk.

Attaching new hard disks

Vagrant can attach multiple disks to a guest using the VirtualBox provider. An example of attaching a single disk to a guest with 10 GB of storage can be found below:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.define "hashicorp" do |h|
    h.vm.box = "hashicorp/bionic64"
    h.vm.provider :virtualbox

    h.vm.disk :disk, size: "10GB", name: "extra_storage"
  end
end

Optionally, if you need to attach many disks, you can use Ruby to generate multiple disks for Vagrant to create and attach to your guest:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.define "hashicorp" do |h|
    h.vm.box = "hashicorp/bionic64"
    h.vm.provider :virtualbox

    (0..3).each do |i|
      h.vm.disk :disk, size: "5GB", name: "disk-#{i}"
    end
  end
end

Note: VirtualBox has a hard limit on the number of disks that can be attached to a given storage controller, which is defined by the controller type. Attempting to configure more disks than are supported by the primary controller will result in a Vagrant error.

Attaching optical drives

Vagrant can attach .iso files as optical drives using the VirtualBox provider. An example of attaching an optical drive to a guest can be found below:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.define "hashicorp" do |h|
    h.vm.box = "hashicorp/bionic64"
    h.vm.provider :virtualbox

    h.vm.disk :dvd, name: "installer", file: "./installer.iso"
  end
end

As with hard disks, configuring more disks than are supported by your VM's storage controller arrangement will result in a Vagrant error.

Removing Disks

If you have removed a disk from your Vagrant config and wish for it to be detached from the guest, you will need to vagrant reload your guest to apply these changes. NOTE: Removing virtual hard disks created by Vagrant will also delete the medium from your hard drive.