For more than four years, I have been using VMWare workstation and from last year I started to use Virtual Box. Virtual Box is a virtualization product by Sun which virtualize X86 platform and supports Windows, Linux, Solaris and Open Solaris as guest operation system. It is good that Virtual Box is released under open source license and it is available for free of cost. You can download Virtual Box from here. Installing Virtual Box should not take more time and it is very simple like installing any software. Just double click the binary executable and answer few usual questions. You are done. I captured the screenshots of creation of Ubuntu Virtual Machine. One feature, I like about Virtual Box is you can reuse Virtual Disk. We will see this in another post. I am presenting the screenshots that I captured. By following this post, you should be able to create a virtual machine and start installing operating system of your choice.
1. Create New Virtual Machine
2. Click Next in "New VM Wizard"
3. Specify Operating system, distribution and give a name to this VM
4. Specify the virtual RAM size (leave at default)
5. Create a new VM and new virtual disk
6. Click next in "Virtual Disk" Wizard. This is the sub-wizard in the main wizard. If you already created virtual disk, you can skip this setup by choosing virtual disk from available list.
7. Choose virtual disk storage type (leave at default)
8. Specify a name for Virtual Disk and size
9. Click "Finish" to create virtual disk
10. Click "Finish" to create VM. After this step, a new VM should have been created.
11. Open settings and choose either CDROM or ISO file location. So that VM will use CD/ISO for OS installation
In this post, we saw how to create virtual machine. The steps are same irrespective the guest operating system. Virtual Machine behaves much like a physical X86 based system and as of now many flavors are Linux, Windows, BSDs can be installed as guest operating system. Guest operating is the operating system that gets installed in the virtual machine. For example, in a Windows XP system, we can virtualize many virtual machines. The operating that gets installed in the virtual machine is generally called as guest operating system.
