JIjitl·Feb 6, 2019
Vagrant is quite extensible; you can plug in KVM via QEMU and Libvirt as a VM "provider", and use Ansible to provision the guest out of the box.
vagrant-libvirt (3rd party): https://github.com/vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt
ansible provisioning (built in): https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/provisioning/ansible.html
This isn't to say these will make the guest filesystem more performant than NFS; you'll probably hit the same bottlenecks with mounting host filesystems into the guest. The solution many users arrived at with Vagrant is to use a user-space synchronization program like Unison that watches for filesystem events (eg, inotify) on both the guest and the host. This is its own can of worms: O(size of files monitored) resource use on both hosts, file ignore lists, async races, etc. There's even a Unison plugin for vagrant, but I found it
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quite finicky and thus unsuitable for large-scale deployment
unison: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
unison-vagrant2: https://github.com/dcosson/vagrant-unison2
At Airbnb, we eventually wrote our own wrapper around Unison to make it easier to use, and saw 90x better perf for filesystem-heavy loads like Webpack once we switched off of NFS in our local VMs.