How can I create a VM in Vagrant with VirtualBox with two CPUs?

Question

On Windows 7 64 bit trying to start up a VM (Ubuntu 32 bit). I\'m having trouble getting my VM to show two cores despite adding the modify vm command in my Vagrantf

Answer 1

Add vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--ioapic", "on"] to the config.vm.provider block inside your Vagrantfile.

Looking at the VirtualBox documentation it mentions:

"Note Enabling the I/O APIC is required for 64-bit guest operating systems, especially Windows Vista; it is also required if you want to use more than one virtual CPU in a virtual machine."

Answer 2

It seems you have not mentioned which provider you are using. As of Vagrant 1.7 many VM providers (such as VirtualBox, HyperV) supports the following configuration in your Vagrantfile:

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
  v.memory = 1024
  v.cpus = 2
end

Check out the specific provider you are using in the vagrant documentation.

Answer 3

If you are running vagrant using Oracle Virtualbox then the most common issue is with Hyper-V in Windows 7, 8 or 10. That will limit you to 32bit and one cpu.

Run or search for "Windows Features" and select "Turn Windows Features On or Off".

In the checkboxes make sure Hyper-V is off - you can't enable VT-x for Virtualbox with Microsoft Hyper-V hogging it.

Then, you can make your Vagrantfile boot very user friendly with:

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    vb.memory = "2404"
    vb.cpus = "2"
  end

Assuming you want to have two cores running and just a bit over 2 Gig of memory

ps - don't forget to add your port forwarding. For PHPStorm (xdebug, mysql, and web) I use:

  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 3306, host: 3306
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 9000, host: 9000