Wow, it doesn't rely on VirtualBox anymore? I remember using it before for the development environment of an old company, and that being a small nuisance.

Nowadays, Docker is really miles ahead in terms of usage in development environments. Vagrant was pretty easy to set-up and use back then, but now Docker is much, much easier.

Vagrant calls the backends "providers." It ships with 4 providers IIRC (VirtualBox, Hyper-V, VMWare, Docker), and there are plugins for dozens of others (it's so large a list because there's one provider each for pretty much every cloud service out there, even ones I've never heard of).

I think that VirtualBox and VMWare are the only two providers that work everywhere, unless docker runs on windows now.

I need to get into this Docker malarkey for dev machines.

Running on Windows, how do you share files between the Docker image and the host machine? With Vagrant I use NFS.

To expand on the other commentor, check out volumes: https://docs.docker.com/engine/admin/volumes/volumes/.

You basically create a mount point inside the VM to a place on your host disk.

I've just started using vagrant with vmware fusion. Whilst not cheap the fans on my computer are much happier these days.