Virtualization technologies offer a simple approach to testing new configurations or developing programs for different operating systems. But virtualization does not only offer a testing environment, it also allows your workstation or server to be independent from the hardware, thus making it easier to move a whole system to a different host.
Introducing VirtualBox
Innotek introduced its VirtualBox virtualization solution as a free download in January 2007. At the time of this writing, version 1.5.2 is available for private or commercial use. VirtualBox offers great snapshot and disk management.
Innotek offers VirtualBox for Windows, OS X (Intel Macs only) as well as many binary installers for different Linux distributions.
Installing VirtualBox On CentOS 5
For this post I’ll be installing VirtualBox on CentOS 5 (surprised?) from the RPM package available at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. There’s nothing to do prior to installing the RPM (no dependencies) at least not on my CentOS 5 system. By default the software is installed into /usr/lib/virtualbox and /usr/share/virtualbox.
The installer will create a user group named vboxusers to which you will need to add all VirtualBox users by issuing the command:
# usermod -G vboxusers [username]
When you’re done adding your VirtualBox users, log on as one of them and launch the application. Click on “New” to add a new virtual machine. Enter a name for the new VM and select an OS:
Then specify the amount of memory (RAM) you want to make available for this VM. I’ve set this to 256 for Windows XP as my host is an old AMD 1.4 with only 768Mb of RAM. I’d usually set this higher to get decent VM performance.
Next we’re going to add a new hard disk.
If you already have an hard disk image of a previous VirtualBox VM, this would be the time to attach it.
The new hard disk type will be fixed-size image as I don’t want this thing to grow infinitely. I don’t know about VirtualBox yet but as for VMWare Server, setting a fixed-size hard disk improves performance. I’m gonna set a 10Gb hard disk for my virtual Windows XP desktop.
As I’ve set only one virtual disk, it’s gonna be selected as the boot device. We’re now ready to install Windows XP. For this part, I’ve made an ISO image of my Windows XP cd. To mount an ISO as a CD / DVD drive, select your newly created VM and click on the “Settings” button. Select CD / DVD-ROM from the left panel and check “Mount CD/DVD Drive”:
From there you could either mount a CD or an ISO image. Now it’s time to boot your VM and install the operating system. Simply click on the “Start” button from the main screen. Your VM should boot from the ISO image or mounted drive.
This is the first time I’m trying out VirtualBox and I gotta say I am loving it. It has this VMWare Server kind of feeling to it and it’s really easy to use. I’ll post more as I experiment with this virtualization tool.
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