CentOS maintainer Karanbir Singh announced today, August 10, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of 64-bit (x86_64) Vagrant Box images for the CentOS Linux 7 and CentOS Linux 6 operating systems.

Vagrant, the open-source and cross-platform virtual development environment creation software, has always been an important part of the CentOS GNU/Linux distribution, which is based on the freely distributed sources of the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system and the preferred OS for servers.

The Vagrant Box editions of CentOS Linux 7 and CentOS Linux 6 consist of a minimal set of packages and are designed for system administrators who want to build a barebone CentOS server on virtual environments. The Vagrant Boxes can be easily compared with the CentOS Cloud and CentOS Minmal flavors.

"We are doing all of our work, including build scripts and build content for these Vagrant Boxes as a part of the CentOS Cloud Instance SIG," says Karanbir Singh. "I would like to invite everyone to come join us and help extend the scope of this work, as well as improve the current results."

The CentOS Linux 7 and CentOS Linux 6 x86_64 Vagrant Box 1607 images are now available for the Oracle VirtualBox and LibVirt virtualization software, and they set the default Vagrant sync directory to /vagrant, disable sshd DNS lookups by default, and set the root password to "vagrant" (without quotes).

To decrease the boot time, the new Vagrant Box 1607 images also set the GRUB timeout to one second. Existing users can now upgrade their boxes directly through Vagrant using the "vagrant box update --box centos/7" command, and newcomers can grab the official images from Hashicorp’s Atlas, here and here.