How to create 100 unique Ubuntu VM's with virtualbox the fast way?

Question

I want to create 100 Ubuntu VM's with virtualbox via commandline. Each Ubuntu VM should have its own unique /etc/machine-id value and unique mac address of the network adapter. There is a file with 100 hostnames (password doesn't matter) and every new Ubuntu VM should get a name assigned from this list.

If i clone 100 times an existing VM then all the new cloned VM's hav the same /etc/machine-id + username + mac address and i have to manually change everything to a new unique one - i dont like that.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Clone, and change the IDs in the .vbox file using sed. Example,

sed -i -e "s/\(MACAddress=\"......\)....../\1$(openssl rand -hex 3)/" vm.vbox
sed -i -e "s/\(Machine uuid=\".........-....-....-....-\)............/\1$(openssl rand -hex 6)/" vm.vbox

You can tidy up the sed and make more complete UUID's, but this is the basic principle. Script it for each .vbox.

Answer 2

You can use Vagrant to provision many machines at once by creating a “Multi-Machine” environment: https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/multi-machine

Vagrant uses a config file that defines the environment and individual machines. It’s trivial to add additional machines:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "echo Hello"

  config.vm.define "web" do |web|
    web.vm.box = "apache"
  end

  config.vm.define "db" do |db|
    db.vm.box = "mysql"
  end
end

With some clever text processing in vscode, it’s trivial to turn your list into a config section.