title: How to Install a Vagrant Box on a Bare Metal Machine?
body: <p>Is there an established way to take a <a href="https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/boxes.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Vagrant box</a> and use it as the operating system for a "bare metal" machine, i.e. a normal computer and not a hypervisor, without having to sit through an installation process?</p>
  
  <p>Now I understand the common response will probably be "install an OS regularly and then use a proper configuration management tool like Puppet or Chef" but hear me out. Our IT organization would like to create a base Vagrant box with all security-related protocols and applications enforced. Then a configuration management tool like Puppet could install "useful" applications like databases and web servers on top of it. </p>
  
  <p>This works best when a software developer wants to deploy a new utility to development environments or servers - they can write the Puppet code to install exactly what they want, which can be turned over to IT to run it on top of the validated Vagrant box to create a virtual machine server. </p>
  
  <p>By hosting the Vagrant box internally, we can hide the security details from the developer while they write new Puppet code, they can test their Puppet code on the same environment they will run it on, and it will provision much faster during testing since the box is just downloaded once. Most "production" deployments will stay as Virtual Machines.</p>
  
  <p>In rare circumstances, we may want a real, bare-metal server, not a VM, probably when we get new hardware to run more VMs or if the utility we need is very computationally intensive. It would be nice if the existing Vagrant box could be repurposed so bare-metal and virtual servers were indistinguishable.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>: I found a post on askubuntu (<a href="https://askubuntu.com/questions/32499/migrate-from-a-virtual-machine-vm-to-a-physical-system">https://askubuntu.com/questions/32499/migrate-from-a-virtual-machine-vm-to-a-physical-system</a>) which seems to do what I want, can anyone verify if such a procedure would work on a Vagrant disk image, if there would be necessary cleanup (like Vagrant ssh keys) or if it could be generalized to non-Ubuntu operating systems (since it uses Live CD)?</p>