How to run an IDE INSIDE a Vagrant VM

Vagrant is intended as a runtime environment for use with your development, not as the development environment (IDE, tools, etc) itself. But I thought it would be nice if I could run my IDE inside the VM. This would have several advantages, including: leverage IDE shortcuts for executing the app, make it easier to connect the debugger, and ease ramp up time for other developers.

So I looked into setting up a Vagrant VM with Netbeans. The necessary steps are downloading and installing Netbeans in a provisioner, and forwarding X11 from the VM to the Host.

There are many options to do silent installation of Netbeans. I had this inside my shell provisioner (note, this takes quite a while to download and install, and you should do this after installing java)

wget http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/7.3/final/bundles/netbeans-7.3-javaee-linux.sh

chmod 755 netbeans-7.3-javaee-linux.sh

sudo ./netbeans-7.3-javaee-linux.sh --silent -J-Dnb-base.installation.location=/opt/netbeans-7.3

rm netbeans-7.3-javaee-linux.sh

To do X11 forwarding requires a few steps

• Add to Vagrantfile: config.ssh.forward_x11 = "false"
• run vagrant with “vagrant up --no-provision” so you don’t download netbeans again!
• vagrant ssh into the VM, running netbeans brings up the UI on your host display, it “just works!”

At this point, it works but performance is horrible. Clicking on a menu in Netbeans takes about 12 seconds to respond.

To improve the performance, we can specify a faster cipher and compression for X11. To specify this, connect with ssh directly instead of using vagrant ssh so we can pass in the ssh options. Use vagrant ssh-config to configure ssh to connect to the vagrant VM: vagrant ssh-config > ~/.ssh/config (be careful not to blow it away if that file already exists). The command looks like ssh -F ~/.ssh/config -c arcfour,blowfish-cbc -XC default  Note that the ssh config is set to “Host default” and we need to specify that (“default”) in the ssh command. Using localhost in the ssh command will not work. After this change, performance is much better but still bad (response time opening menus goes from 12 seconds to 4 seconds)

Additional things to try include manually modifying the VM video RAM to 64MB from 8, but that had no effect. (Indeed another VM I use for development that has the full gnome desktop installed and regularly run an IDE with no issue has only 12MB of video RAM) Another initially promising option was to enable VirtualBox 2D acceleration, but that is for Windows guests only so is not an option for Linux guests.

More potential steps you can take to improve the performance

• VMWare’s provider is rumored to have special graphics optimizations that let you work with an IDE inside a VM.
• You can try VRDP, it may have better performance than X11
• NX Server is supposed to be faster than X11

In conclusion, using Vagrant as your complete development environment does not really work out as well as you’d hope. Perhaps not so surprisingly, it’s best to use Vagrant as it was intended.