Something like rsync folders would be useful

[jkugler]

We've been using vagrant-vsphere for our testing in Kitchen (with a nice custom Vagrantfile.erb) and it has been working well.

We'd like to investigate kitchen-vcenter, but it's missing a major feature that we absolutely rely on in Vagrant: rsync folders to get our source code on to the machine to be tested (pull requests tests, etc).

It would be nice if kitchen-vcenter could accept the syntax of vagrant for shared folders. We don't need monitoring/updates as it would be a one-time rsync up to the new VM when it gets spun up.

I realize this is a huge ask, so I don't expect it to be done tomorrow, but I wanted to start a conversation to see if something like this would even be feasible. :)

For reference: https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/synced-folders/rsync.html

[thheinen]

I think, that'd be more appropriate on the transport level than the driver. Strictly speaking, the Driver is only working from the initial provisioning request up to getting the IP of the created VM. Then, a transport plugin picks it up and initiates the connection for subsequent steps.

For some time, I've pondered the idea of implementing a "vmware" transport as well, which would make use of the VMware Tools functionality to execute commands and transfer data without needing SSH (solving plenty of network/firewall issues). There, one could certainly try to implement such functionality. For now, I'd only have this on low priority though. So I can't promise anything from my side.