Creating Virtual Machine in VirtualBox - Screenshots

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

12. And finally start the VM. Now VM is ready to install Operating system. From here, VM is as good as physical machine.

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.

Virtualization - Cost effective and Environment friendly

In the last few years, the hardware industry and its technological advancements are on par with software technologies. To be precise and honest, the hardware industry in fact outperformed the software industry by introducing so many features. In the past, particularly the processor manufacturers were focussed on increasing the clock frequency of the processors. The clock frequency saturation forced the processor designer to focus on other aspects to increase the processing power. The processor vendors used variety of other techniques such as hyper-threading to improve upon the processing power.

The recent day computers/hardware devices have more processing power and the hard truth is that less than 50% percent of the hardware resources are used on an average basis. In a normal day, the hardware irrespective of whether it is a desktop system, servers or servers in data center, all the resources are under utilized.

The pace of hardware advancement also forces organizations to spend considerable money on upgradation. But the worst part in upgrading is it that it soon becomes outdated within few months after the upgrade. The organizations spend hefty sum on upgrades. Particularly, the hardware upgradation may not be considered as investment but as running cost to maintain the existing services. By and large, there is no ROI for the upgrade. Also, after the upgrade there is greater possibility of throwing the old and outdated hardware. Having a lot of physical resources directly affects the manageability such as security and regularly maintaining the resources.

The next problem and most important one is energy. There has been consistent appeal from the entire humanity of conserving power. Not only that it leads to depletion of energy but also increases the operating cost. The fuel and energy prices are increasing day by day and the organizations are looking out opportunities to reduce cost on energy. The conservation of energy has twin advantages. First it reduces the operating cost and secondly it leads to Green revolution. But the more the hardware, the more it consumes power directly affecting the operating cost. Secondly, because of the large number of physical hardware, a lot of heat is generated and which once again increases the energy demand (spend time and effort to improve infrastructure for quick heat dissipation). The over consumption of energy is recurrent problem. To summarize, there are three main issues - low resource utilization, higher maintenance cost and higher energy consumption.

Considering all the above facts, Virtualization as a technology offers a lot edge. Virtualization is software abstraction layer allowing us to run multiple virtual operating systems in parallel. With virtualization one can run multiple virtual machines simultaneously and thus improving the resource utilization of physical resources. Since these virtual machine run on single physical server, it leads to energy conservation. Also, it reduces the hardware upgradation cost to a larger extent.

Apart from the main advantages, being a software layer, virtualization offers lot of features which increases the productivity. The entire virtual machine is stored as single file leading to easy archival. An important feature that must be mentioned is "Isolation". Each virtual machine is isolated (sandbox) and even the virtual machines running on the same machine need to communication through virtual network. This particular feature boosts the security of the virtual machines.

Virtualization is used in many areas such as storage virtualization, server virtualization, virtualizing application and also in software development lifecycle. Based on the research by Gartner, the virtualization market is expected to grow exponentially and there will be lot of organization showing interest for adopting virtualization.

Hope this article would have given an overview about virtualization. In the upcoming articles, we will discuss more on various virtualization products.

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