Hello hashnode, this is my first blogpost here. It’s no news that I’ve been on the ALX Software Engineering program for over 2 weeks now and I’ve been documenting my journey on medium till I learnt about hashnode.

It’s day 14 already and I’ve learnt a lot. Today, we had a walk- in session with Faith and as promised I’ll be talking about Vagrant in today’s post.

Technical Walk In Session

Walk-in sessions are designed to clear blockers and Faith did justice to clear most of the blockers other participants faced. I currently have no blockers with anything on what we needed to know for the probation phase but I did have some questions on personal access tokens and git cloning. However, a simple google search came to the rescue.

Virtualization

To understand what Vagrant is a knowledge of virtualization is very important . Virtualization is a concept that explains the ability of virtual computers to run on either the physical hardware of a system or on the operating system of a physical computer.

You must understand that virtual computers aren’t physical computers . For example, you could decide you want to run a MacOS on your system that uses WindowsOS . You could decide to go to the store and get a new MacBook but if you’re not willing to go get a new MacBook you could simply run a virtual computer on your current computer without really breaking the bank.

The physical computer is called the host while the virtual computer is called the guest.

Types of Virtualization

1. Type 1 Virtualization: Here the guest computers run on the physical hardware of the host. Assuming you had an 8GB ram Laptop and Windows OS takes 4GB ram to operate and you want to run another OS you would be sharing the 8GB ram with that virtual computer.

2. Type 2 Virtualization: This is a type of virtualization where the operating system of a guest is allowed sit on the operating system of a host . Note that these operating systems are independent of each other and they act alone.

Why Do We Need Virtual Computers?

As Software Engineers, it’s important you don’t run your codes on your physical computer as there are tendencies you could have dependencies that could hamper the smooth execution of your codes. It’s important you separate your working platform from your physical computer to contain damages if they occur.

Vagrant

Is a tool that enables us to manage virtual environments that are made available to us from virtual providers.

It was started as a side project by Mitchell Hashimoto. It’s an open source software and it’s light weight . Most importantly it’s free.

You can get it here

I think that’s all about Vagrant and all you need to know , you’ll get to know better when you install it and start using it .