Sometimes systems administrators need to perform some ‘alternative’ tasks that require some ‘temporary’ workspaces.

Does one have a space machine? Sometimes, but not always.

Well, Vagrant + Virtualbox + fso/xenial64-desktop will give you just that.

Virtualbox supports displaying the VM in Virtualbox, so, once the image is ‘vagrant init fso/xenial64-desktop and vagrant up` you will have a clean, new Desktop to do.

In this case, I helped a junior admin migration some email to Office 365 email. We created an encrypted backup after the migration, then destroyed the intermediate machine.