vagrant up is the equivalent of running VBoxManage startvm $NAME –type headless or VBoxHeadless –startvm $NAME i.e. starting the VM up headless (without a virtual monitor attached), but it handles various other configuration like the port forwarding, etc. at the same time
vagrant ssh is the equivalent of SSH’ing into the VM, but as Vagrant has already taken care of the port forwarding and virtual networking for you, it connects to the VM on a host-only network using the IP it setup for it during vagrant up
So even though Vagrant is essentially a wrapper for VirtualBox/VMWare, it takes care of quite a lot of things for you!
This clarifies things a bit. So what does vagrant up do and why do we need to do a vagrant ssh?
vagrant up is the equivalent of running VBoxManage startvm $NAME –type headless or VBoxHeadless –startvm $NAME i.e. starting the VM up headless (without a virtual monitor attached), but it handles various other configuration like the port forwarding, etc. at the same time
vagrant ssh is the equivalent of SSH’ing into the VM, but as Vagrant has already taken care of the port forwarding and virtual networking for you, it connects to the VM on a host-only network using the IP it setup for it during vagrant up
So even though Vagrant is essentially a wrapper for VirtualBox/VMWare, it takes care of quite a lot of things for you!