While a test cluster can be deployed on any hardware or virtual machine, for the purposes of this book a combination of Vagrant and VirtualBox will be used. This will allow rapid provision of the virtual machines and ensure a consistent environment.

VirtualBox is a free and open source hypervisor currently being developed by Oracle; while its performance and features may be lacking compared to high-end hypervisors, its lightweight approach and multi-OS support lend itself to its being a prime candidate for testing.

Vagrant assists in allowing an environment that may comprise many machines to be created quickly and efficiently. It works with the concepts of boxes, which are predefined templates for use with hypervisors and its Vagrantfile, which defines the environment to be built. It supports multiple hypervisors and allows a Vagrantfile to be portable across them.