What are the advantages of using Chef-server with Vagrant v/s Chef-Solo with Vagrant?

Question

I've done some read-up on Vagrant with Chef-Server v/s Vagrant with Chef-solo and have found blogs talking about the usage of the same. I've failed to find anybody summarizing the advantages of either approach. So, here's my question.

I understand that Vagrant cannot spin up virtual machines on a remote machine. This means running "vagrant up" on a particular machine will spin up VMs on that machine alone.

First of all, is this understanding right? If yes, what’s the point of using a chef server to provision the server?

I feel that if I’m using Vagrant, using chef solo is the way to go and chef server isn’t adding any value.

Do you think I’m missing something?

Answer 1

Vagrant is used for spin up VMs and you can provision those VMs with the help of chef recipes or via any other provisioning method. https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/provisioning/index.html

Now, Difference between Chef Server and Chef-Solo: Chef Server works in Client Server Architecture. You can control or manage all your nodes (VMs launched by Vagrant) with the help of Chef Server. In a particular VM, you can search for other nodes with the help of Chef Server.

Chef-Solo works in Solo mode means, you can provision only single node and you can not get any information about the other nodes. However several techniques exists to overcome such situations like chef-solo-search.