What is the "preparing" state of a vagrant machine? [closed]

Question

When I run vagrant global-status, I see that some of my machines are in the state "preparing", which I have not seen from global-status before. What does this status mean? It seems to change to running after I check on the status of the server specifically.

$ vagrant global-status
id       name         provider state     directory
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1b9c91d  arthur       aws    running   /Users/afarrell/projects/saltmarsh
824fc08  sir-lancelot aws    preparing /Users/afarrell/projects/saltmarsh
2dc5f8a  sir-galahad  aws    preparing /Users/afarrell/projects/saltmarsh
cfb0009  sir-robin    aws    preparing /Users/afarrell/projects/saltmarsh
The above shows information about...[clipped]

$ vagrant status sir-robin
Current machine states:

sir-robin                 running (aws)

The EC2 instance is running. To stop this machine, you can run
`vagrant halt`. To destroy the machine, you can run `vagrant destroy`.

$ vagrant global-status
id       name         provider state     directory
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1b9c91d  arthur       aws    running   /Users/afarrell/projects/saltmarsh
824fc08  sir-lancelot aws    preparing /Users/afarrell/projects/saltmarsh
2dc5f8a  sir-galahad  aws    preparing /Users/afarrell/projects/saltmarsh
cfb0009  sir-robin    aws    running   /Users/afarrell/projects/saltmarsh

Answer 1

"preparing" is entered when the configuration is read and the VM is created, but the provider has not confirmed it to be "running". With virtualbox this is pretty quick and you usually never see that stage, but with remote instances the preparing stage might take some time.

BTW, if in doubt use the source: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant