Vagrant is like an enhanced command line interface for VirtualBox. You have a vagrant directory for each of your VMs containing a configuration File. You will need to run all your vagrant commands from this directory. This directory will only contain the configuration. VMs will be located in your VirtualBox directory. The magic happens when you use chef-client in your Vagrantfile to install packages automatically in your VM.

Make sure you have installed Virtualbox : https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

• Download Vagrant from https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
• Create a vagrant directory where you want to put your Vagrant configs

mkdir ~/vagrant

• Create a directory specific for a VM, for ex :

mkdir ~/vagrant/chef-server

• Initialize vagrant in its directory

cd ~/vagrant/chef-server
vagrant init

• Add a box locally, here "precise32", choose from : https://vagrantcloud.com/discover/featured OR http://www.vagrantbox.es/

vagrant box add precise32 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise32.box

• Edit Vagrantfile according to your expections. See https://github.com/MaximeDevLA/vagrant-configs/Vagrantfiles
• Start vagrant, it will spin up your new VM. Same command to start the VM if it was shutdown. It's not gonna re-install the VM though.

vagrant up