Pre-install Vagrant and VirtualBox

[tknerr]

As per http://help.appveyor.com/discussions/suggestions/519-pre-install-vagrant-and-virtualbox-on-build-workers it would be super useful to have Vagrant and VirtualBox preinstalled:

Vagrant + VirtualBox are a sweet combination for testing infrastructure on Windows (and other platforms too).

Here are some initial tests which download and install Vagrant / Virtualbox and then bring up an Ubuntu VM:

• on azure: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/tknerr/vagrant-appveyor-testing/his...
• on hyperv: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/ukio/vagrant-appveyor-testing/history

On azure it takes about 8-12 minutes for downloading and installing vagrant + virtualbox. On hyperv it's much faster (2-4 minutes) but still takes some precious build time.

In addition to installing vagrant + virtualbox the time for bringing up a VM varies between 4 (hyperv) and up to 15 (azure) minutes.

It would be super useful if Vagrant and VirtualBox were already preinstalled, especially on azure where this alone takes ~10 minutes.

From my experience:

• VirtualBox can be installed only once as it writes registry entries and creates additional network adapters, which is OK because usually you update it very rarely
• Vagrant can coexist in multiple installations / directories, you just have to add its bin directory to the path (same pattern as with the different Ruby runtimes). This would allow for switching between different vagrant versions (e.g. latest from 1.6 line vs. latest from 1.7 line)

To my knowledge AppVeyor would be the very first platform that enables infrastructure and cookbook testing that this is free for OSS! (with the performance penalty though, which would be a good chance for getting new paying customers too)

What do you think?

[jamestoyer]

I really like this idea. It would really simplify doing integration tests with databases for example