[CentOS-devel] centos/7 vagrant box: Could not find a controller named 'IDE Controller'

[Marcin Dulak]

On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Laurentiu Pancescu <lpancescu at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello Marcin,
>
> On 04/12/16 04:52, Marcin Dulak wrote:
>
>> it looks to me that the reason for 'IDE Controller' missing may be
>> actually
>> in the box.ovf file,
>>
>
>

> perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my previous reply: there is no guarantee
> that a Vagrant box will have an IDE controller named "IDE Controller", and
> there never was.  There is no mention of IDE in the Vagrant
> documentation[1], and, if I may quote from the VirtualBox User Manual,
> chapter 5, section 5.1, the last paragraph[2]:
>


| In general, you should avoid IDE unless it is the only controller
> | supported by your guest. Whether you use SATA, SCSI or SAS does not
> | make any real difference.
>
>
Just imagine how many people may be affected by 'IDE Controller' suddenly
missing and applying the workaround by changing the name to 'IDE'.
Over the years the name has changed several times in some setups
https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/issues/204 and one may expect
that sooner or later the 'IDE Controller' will reappear causing troubles
again.

I'm saying that box.ovf provided by centos vagrant boxes may be possibly
incorrect, as the configuration is not read.
Please verify this. The box.ovf contains 'IDE Controller' - maybe
correcting box.ovf is enough to bring the 'IDE Controller' back.

Using SATA has concrete performance benefits, both in disk performance on
> the guest, as well as in CPU and memory usage on the host.  I'm already
> using SATA instead of IDE for my own experimental Vagrant boxes for
> VirtualBox, and switching our official boxes away from IDE is something I'm
> considering for the future.  Such boxes wouldn't have any IDE controller at
> all.
>
> My advice would be to change your Vagrantfile to find the storage
> controller used by the VirtualBox VM (you can write normal Ruby code inside
> a Vagrantfile); if that's too complex, an alternative would be to add an
> additional storage controller with a name of your choosing and attach you
> disk image there.
>

adding a custom controller presupposes that there is no other controller of
the same type already present,
so for example one cannot add 'IDE Controller' if an 'IDE' of type ide is
already present.
Moreover testing for the presence of the controller is not elegant as it
involves overriding vagrant methods: https://gist.github.com/leifg/4713995
and it would need to be worked out for all possible workflows like
reloading the VM https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/6682
with disks shareable between different VMs in a multi-machine environment.

Best regards,

Marcin


>
> Best regards,
> Laurențiu
>
>
> [1] https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/virtualbox/boxes.html
> [2] https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch05.html#harddiskcontrollers
>
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