I have recently started using Vagrant with VirtualBox to isolate development environments for several projects on my Ubuntu. In this way I can create a clean development environment with preinstalled softwares easily.

In this tutorial I will create a new Windows 10 box with Visual Studio 2015. I would like to document the main steps of creating the template virtual machine without going into details about configuration possibilities of the components I use.

The main components

Vagrant: This is used for managing template virtual machines (boxes) and create, manage and destroy virtual machine instances from these boxes easily.
VirtualBox: The desktop virtualization product I use with Vagrant, but you can use Vagrant with other VMs as well (e.g VMWare, Hyper-V).
Packer: It is used to create template boxes for Vagrant. It installs and preconfigures virtual machines with several OSs. It supports other virtualization infrastructures too.
Packer Windows templates: Packer configuration files and scripts for creating Windows boxes.

Steps

Creating Windows 10 base box

Download and intall Vagrant then install winrm-fs plugin, this will be required for running provision script on Windows 10 guest:
```
vagrant plugin install winrm-fs
```
Install VirtualBox.
Download Packer from http://www.packer.io/downloads.html and extract e.g. into ~/packer directory.

Download packer templates from https://github.com/joefitzgerald:

git clone https://github.com/joefitzgerald/packer-windows.git

Download Windows iso and place in packer-windows/iso folder. I downloaded en_windows_10_multiple_editions_x64_dvd_6846432.iso from my MSDN account.
By default the Windows 10 template will create C: drive with size 60GB, I changed it in windows_10.json under virtualbox-iso builder. You can make another configuration changes here, like memory amount or CPU count:
```
"type": "virtualbox-iso",
...
"disk_size": 184320,
```
Open packer-windows/answer_files/10/Autounattend.xml and find <ProductKey> element and enter valid product key under <Key> element:
```
<ProductKey>
    <Key>XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX</Key>
    <WillShowUI>Never</WillShowUI>
</ProductKey>
```

Generate SHA1 hash for the ISO

sha1sum en_windows_10_multiple_editions_x64_dvd_6846432.iso

Execute packer in the packer-windows directory by providing iso name and generated hash. The -only=virtualbox-iso tells that only VirtualBox target will be created:

~/packer/packer build -var iso_url=./iso/en_windows_10_multiple_editions_x64_dvd_6846432.iso -var iso_checksum=60cce9e9c6557335b4f7b18d02cfe2b438a8b3e2 -only=virtualbox-iso windows_10.json

This will create and preconfigure the reusable VirtualBox compatible Vagrant box with name windows_10_virtualbox.box (install windows updates, virtualbox guest additions, vagrant provision tools, etc).

Import the box into vagrant with name windows10:

vagrant box add windows10 ./windows_10_virtualbox.box

After this step vagrant instances can be created using the bare Windows 10 box.

Install Visual Studio 2015 and configure provision script

Now, I would like to install Visual Studio, so I create a vagrant instance using windows10 box, install Visual Studio and then export the box.

Create a new VM:

mkdir windows10_vs2015
cd windows10_vs2015
vagrant init windows10

Enable gui in the created Vagrantfile by uncommenting the following lines:
```
config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    vb.gui = true
end
```
Turn on the VM:
```
vagrant up
```
Install Visual Studio 2015 and do any necessary modifications of the VM.

I usually create provision script which installs Chocolatey and other softwares using it. The provision script will be executed when vagrant up is called at the first time on the exported box. Create windows10_vs2015/provision/provision.ps1 script:

iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
chocolatey feature enable -n allowGlobalConfirmation
choco install totalcommander
choco install resharper
choco install gitextensions
choco install notepadplusplus
choco install GoogleChrome
choco install kdiff3
choco install yed
choco install atom
choco install webstorm
choco install haroopad
choco install libreoffice
choco install foxitreader
choco install consolez

Create new windows10_vs2015/Vagrantfile.pkg file, this will be packaged into the box containing base configurations for the box (the local Vagrantfile in the actual instance’s folder inherits this):

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
    config.vm.communicator = "winrm"


    config.winrm.username = "vagrant"
    config.winrm.password = "vagrant"


    config.vm.guest = :windows
    config.windows.halt_timeout = 15


    config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 3389, host: 3389, id: "rdp", auto_correct: true
    config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 22, host: 2222, id: "ssh", auto_correct: true


    config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |v, override|
        v.gui = true
        v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", 2048]
        v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--cpus", 2]
        v.customize ["setextradata", "global", "GUI/SuppressMessages", "all" ]
    end


    config.vm.provision "shell" do |s|
      p = File.expand_path("../", __FILE__)
      s.path = p + "/provision/provision.ps1"
    end
end

Now export the modified virtual machine:

vagrant package --output windows10_vs2015.box --vagrantfile ./Vagrantfile.pkg --include ./provision/*

After executing the command, windows10_vs2015.box will be created in the current current directory.
Import the created box into vagrant using the following command:
```
vagrant box add --name windows10_vs2015 windows10_vs2015.box
```

Testing the box

Create a new VM and up the box:

mkdir windows10_vs2015_test
cd windows10_vs2015_test
vagrant init windows10_vs2015
vagrant up

After executing the command you will have a Windows 10 box with Visual Studio 2015 and preinstalled softwares you configured in provision script.