Laravel’s Homestead is amazing and makes developing PHP applications locally a breeze, but Virtualbox is painfully slow. There are some things you can do to increase performance within Vagrant/Virtualbox, like enabling NFS shared folders, but VMware has Virtualbox beat in terms of virtualized performance. I set out to make Homestead work with the vmware_desktop provider, and ran into a few issues along the way, which I’ll explain.
I haven’t personally noticed Virtualbox being that slow, but good to have choices. Besides submitting a pull request Josh also packaged this up on VagrantCloud for all to use.
