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== Introduction ==
Development environments of modern embedded systems are getting more complex as technology of systems-on-chips (SoC) evolves. A lot of things have to be set up on host side - cross-tool chains, libraries, debuggers etc. - before developer can put his/her hands on the target. This process is mandatory unavoidable but really boring and often even frustrating. Also, even if instructions provided by board vendor are clear and exhaustive, it is likely that the resulting host configuration is either incorrect or incomplete.
DAVE Embedded Systems has developed a new powerful tool to tackle this issue, called Managed Virtual Machine (MVM for short).
*to '''start working on DAVE Embedded Systems's platforms very quickly''', because it avoids manual installing and configuring of the development environment
*to keep development host configuration '''synced with the updates''' released by DAVE Embedded Systems.
This approach permits to achieve two important goals:
*reducing the initial set up effort significantly
*customer's host machine is constantly synchronized with the one used by DAVE Embedded Systems to build and validate the software released releases for the targets, resulting in increased efficiency and effectiveness of software-related support activities.
The MVM is created and managed using Vagrant (https://www.vagrantup.com/), which is a powerful tool that creates, configures and manages virtual development environments. Vagrant uses '''Providers''' to integrate with the hypervisor that provides the virtual machines, that for the MVM is Oracle VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/). The entire virtual environment configuration is stored in simple plain text files, including the instructions for the '''provisioning tool''' (Puppet, https://puppetlabs.com/), so that installation, management and update of the MVM is straightforward.
[[File:Mvm-vagrant-bd.png|700pxthumb|center|600px|MVM creation process]]
The MVM comes with all the development tools and source code, pre-configured, and requires only a minimal setup by the end user.