Virtualization

[wyverary]

Basically, I've become obsessed. I have a Macbook Pro running Virtualbox, and I almost can't help myself in installing ISOs of various Linux distros, as well as Windows 7, 8, and 10 (I have free access to this stuff thanks to my school account), and plan on trying out some server software as well. The only problem I've come across that I can't fix is with Fedora, which does not seem to play well with VB or its guest additions. (Any ideas on how to fix that, btw?) I'm trying to learn my way through as many OSes as possible.

(And I made the mistake of putting 8.1 into Boot Camp. Bad decision, that was.)

So I guess...I've always loved tinkering, and this is just an extension of that. Does anyone else enjoy this sort of thing?

 

[superboyian]

Yes. I also have a macbook but I have the air edition though and have previously installed different versions of Windows through bootcamp. The last time having to install Windows 10 technical preview and from my experience, it was actually pretty good. All other operating systems I tend to just install through VirtualBox.

With Fedora, have you tried unchecking enable EFI or vise versa, maybe that could be the reason why you may not be able to run it smoothly? I also try to enable 3D accelerator, I've noticed that has improved some operating systems on there and upgrading the video memory under virtualbox display settings?

 

[AsheSkyler]

Make sure your computer meets the requirements for the server. When I was at ITT Tech, we did Windows Server 2008. Problem is, it required 8 GB of RAM and our work computers had only 3, which as you know has to be shared between the host and virtual OS. My last teacher was a professional out in the field and trying his first semester as a teacher, and he had all sorts of colorful things to say about why our servers crashed and did weird things all the time.

Fedora is just moody, methinks. I had mine up and running perfectly, but the guy next to me was having fits with mine. So as a test, we let me install his copy exactly like mine with my CD and everything. (Already had matching settings in the virtual program.) His still wouldn't work. Heh, yet I was the one who got the "sleeping forever" error a few days later.

I don't do virtual OSs any more. Takes up too much space. What I like is the Linux LiveCDs! Even used one a few months ago in tandem with a Linux password cracker because it had been a few years since we tried running one of my husband's old computers. Only gave us the first couple of characters, but it was enough to jog his memory as to what the password was.

 

[Judge]

Basically, I've become obsessed. I have a Macbook Pro running Virtualbox, and I almost can't help myself in installing ISOs of various Linux distros, as well as Windows 7, 8, and 10 (I have free access to this stuff thanks to my school account), and plan on trying out some server software as well.

Well, now I can certainly understand why you wanted all that hard disk space on your Macbook.

 

[wyverary]

Well, now I can certainly understand why you wanted all that hard disk space on your Macbook.

Actually, I have most of my VMs on an external drive.

AsheSkyler I honestly didn't have very high expectations with servers. I haven't really even touched them yet, and probably won't.

 

[AsheSkyler]

I honestly didn't have very high expectations with servers. I haven't really even touched them yet, and probably won't.

If ya get a Linux server to work if you ever dabble in them, let me know. We had a very jaded government security officer as our teacher, and it didn't go anywhere.

 

[23andaspie]

That's impressive. What are the specs on your MacBook?

I have a MacBook Air (4 GB RAM) but I use a Lenovo ThinkServer for visualization purposes. The machine itself (hard drive not included) was only about $250. I upgraded the RAM to 32 GB, as well as invested in a solid-state drive.

It runs Linux Mint, and in VirtualBox I currently have Windows 10 and Android-x86 installed. It runs smoothly even though the processor is only an i3. I've played around with other Linux distros: Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat, CentOS, lubuntu, Elementary OS, Boddhi Linux, and Bio-Linux. But as far as my means for virtualization - there are simply some programs that are only available on Windows.

If you're interested in setting up a server on Linux, it's not that hard. Here are some potentially helpful resources: how to install LAMP, ngrok for forwarding a custom domain name to localhost, installing SSL. That's more or less what I followed to get a site hosted locally.

I'd be more than happy to help out with server setup - just shoot me a message.

 

[wanderer03]

Virtualization is mad-cool! I agree. I'm doing both Linux containers and RedHat KVM. Lots of fun.

 

[wyverary]

The only computer I have access to (outside of school) is a Macbook Pro with just 8GB of RAM. That limitation makes virtualizing more than a couple of OSes at a time kind of difficult (which is a shame because I want to practice network virtuatlization). I suppose I can run Linux servers with limited RAM.

I'm also trying to settle on VM software. I've been using VirtualBox but everyone tells me VMware is much better (my experience tells me the same, actually, but the free version doesn't let you do much with it...anyone have any opinions?) and I actually run most of my VMs from my Windows partition for various reasons. I'm also waiting to learn more about servers and Linux in general before I really get my hands dirty.

 

[23andaspie]

Yeah, some Linux distros like CentOS (free RedHat) targeted for server use install only with the CLI only to save resources. This could give you some leeway. There's also some distributions like lubuntu that are made for resource-limited environments.

What processor does your MacBook have? The number of cores available is going to another major factor when running multiple instances at a time.

VMware actually offers a 30-day free trial - I would definitely give it a try! I actually just started mine a few days ago after several failed attempts trying to install Mac OSX on VirtualBox. I used that same iso in VMware, and it installed on my first attempt. Also, the nice thing is that VirtualBox virtual disks can be exported and converted so that they can be ported to VMware with everything you had in the virt drive fully intact.

I am actually seriously considering working at VMware.

 

[wyverary]

Yeah, some Linux distros like CentOS (free RedHat) targeted for server use install only with the CLI only to save resources. This could give you some leeway. There's also some distributions like lubuntu that are made for resource-limited environments.

What processor does your MacBook have? The number of cores available is going to another major factor when running multiple instances at a time.

VMware actually offers a 30-day free trial - I would definitely give it a try! I actually just started mine a few days ago after several failed attempts trying to install Mac OSX on VirtualBox. I used that same iso in VMware, and it installed on my first attempt. Also, the nice thing is that VirtualBox virtual disks can be exported and converted so that they can be ported to VMware with everything you had in the virt drive fully intact.

I am actually seriously considering working at VMware.

That'd be cool if you could get a job at VMware! I've used the free version, of course.

I recently switched to virtualizing from my Bootcamp partition, and the GUI's on all the virtualization software (including VirtualBox) are so much better on Windows! Mac OS X is a nightmare for virtualizing simply because of the nature of its native GUI. I've taken a liking to Hyper-V, in fact...a lot of people poo-poo it, but I've found it very powerful and flexible. As someone has already said, it's a lot easier to virtualize servers that are purely CLI-based when you have limited resources. I have an Intel i7 dual core 2.9GHz, and for the most part it works perfectly fine for my purposes (eventually I will try and build my own desktop with much more powerful hardware, but right now, with my current pitiful financial state, that is absolutely out of the question). FWIW, all my VM stuff is run off of an external hard drive...not ideal, but perfectly fine for what I use it for. I am running the test version of Windows 10 and have dabbled with Linux servers (which at this point are well above my skill level), and am likely to try out some Windows servers as well...Having a Microsoft DreamSpark account is the tech equivalent of a kid in a candy store.

 

[23andaspie]

That'd be cool if you could get a job at VMware! I've used the free version, of course.

I recently switched to virtualizing from my Bootcamp partition, and the GUI's on all the virtualization software (including VirtualBox) are so much better on Windows! Mac OS X is a nightmare for virtualizing simply because of the nature of its native GUI. I've taken a liking to Hyper-V, in fact...a lot of people poo-poo it, but I've found it very powerful and flexible. As someone has already said, it's a lot easier to virtualize servers that are purely CLI-based when you have limited resources. I have an Intel i7 dual core 2.9GHz, and for the most part it works perfectly fine for my purposes (eventually I will try and build my own desktop with much more powerful hardware, but right now, with my current pitiful financial state, that is absolutely out of the question). FWIW, all my VM stuff is run off of an external hard drive...not ideal, but perfectly fine for what I use it for. I am running the test version of Windows 10 and have dabbled with Linux servers (which at this point are well above my skill level), and am likely to try out some Windows servers as well...Having a Microsoft DreamSpark account is the tech equivalent of a kid in a candy store.

My virtual instances usually run on Linux as a base, but having also ran them on OSX, I never really noticed that they sucked for visualizing? I had always assumed that the hardware specs were the predominant factor.

An i7 and 8GB RAM is pretty cutting-edge when it comes to laptops, i.e. my Air which is less than a year old is i5/4GB, and even my work Pro was only i5/8GB despite people actually using them as their primary machine for software development, since people didn't like developing on RedHat for some reason.

When you do have the cash, the nice thing about purchasing a desktop is that you don't have to buy it all up front. What I mean is that I started with a $250 new ThinkServer (only missing a hard drive), and later upgraded the RAM to eventually 32GB, added a solid-state drive, and just recently upgraded the i3 to an i7 in different phases (just think - the i7 which is about the size of a graham cracker costs more than the ThinkServer itself, which includes an i3!). But compared to Airs starting at $999 or something, $250 to me feels like a good deal.

Really? I swear I tried moving my VDI from virtualbox onto an external drive, set up a symlink in place of the file's original location, yet it was performing so slowly that I gave up before the guest OS even booted. But your results have inspired me to try once more.

Currently I'm running (not all simultaneously)
Linux Mint (MATE) 17.1 - base
.. Windows 10 Preview - Can't live without my emClient
.. CentOS - Needed a better way to decouple two hosted websites, so once is now being hosted in a virt instance
.. Hackintosh Yosemite - I've invested too much money on OSX software that does not fit on my puny Air hard drive.

 

[wyverary]

My virtual instances usually run on Linux as a base, but having also ran them on OSX, I never really noticed that they sucked for visualizing? I had always assumed that the hardware specs were the predominant factor.

An i7 and 8GB RAM is pretty cutting-edge when it comes to laptops, i.e. my Air which is less than a year old is i5/4GB, and even my work Pro was only i5/8GB despite people actually using them as their primary machine for software development, since people didn't like developing on RedHat for some reason.

When you do have the cash, the nice thing about purchasing a desktop is that you don't have to buy it all up front. What I mean is that I started with a $250 new ThinkServer (only missing a hard drive), and later upgraded the RAM to eventually 32GB, added a solid-state drive, and just recently upgraded the i3 to an i7 in different phases (just think - the i7 which is about the size of a graham cracker costs more than the ThinkServer itself, which includes an i3!). But compared to Airs starting at $999 or something, $250 to me feels like a good deal.

Really? I swear I tried moving my VDI from virtualbox onto an external drive, set up a symlink in place of the file's original location, yet it was performing so slowly that I gave up before the guest OS even booted. But your results have inspired me to try once more.

Currently I'm running (not all simultaneously)
Linux Mint (MATE) 17.1 - base
.. Windows 10 Preview - Can't live without my emClient
.. CentOS - Needed a better way to decouple two hosted websites, so once is now being hosted in a virt instance
.. Hackintosh Yosemite - I've invested too much money on OSX software that does not fit on my puny Air hard drive.

Yeah, and considering I bought my MacBook almost three years ago (and spent a pretty penny on the souped-up 13" version!), I'm still impressed with its performance. I'd love to make some upgrades, but I can't until the warranty expires (and don't berate me about AppleCare...it's paid for itself already...I even got a brand new battery just a few months ago!). Yes, the external drive is a little slow, especially considering it's a portable running at about 5400, but honestly it's good enough for my purposes, and Windows 10 actually runs pretty well off of Hyper-V, which I've noticed is quite a lot faster than both VirtualBox and VMware...of course, it requires you to have a Pro version of Windows, which I got for free of course, and is probably inaccessible to a majority of end users. Somehow I lucked out and wound up with the full, paid version of Tuxera when I purchased one of my four external drives, so NTFS formatting isn't really an issue when I'm doing cross-platform work. Alas, I simply don't have the internal hard drive space to accommodate multiple VMs. And Linux Mint MATE is awesome! I've played around with it before. I'd love to learn more about Linux...the problem is that the learning curve is pretty much a vertical line! And from what I've learned, it's the least secure operating system out there, at least "out of the box." I even experimented with Arch, but I think it'll be a long way off before I learn enough to get it set up properly. I hope to work towards a Linux+ certification if I can.

I have a friend who was telling me all about how he built his own machine and set up Hackintosh...it sounded pretty badass, and I'd love to go visit him and have him show it off to me.

 

[23andaspie]

Yeah, and considering I bought my MacBook almost three years ago (and spent a pretty penny on the souped-up 13" version!), I'm still impressed with its performance. I'd love to make some upgrades, but I can't until the warranty expires (and don't berate me about AppleCare...it's paid for itself already...I even got a brand new battery just a few months ago!). Yes, the external drive is a little slow, especially considering it's a portable running at about 5400, but honestly it's good enough for my purposes, and Windows 10 actually runs pretty well off of Hyper-V, which I've noticed is quite a lot faster than both VirtualBox and VMware...of course, it requires you to have a Pro version of Windows, which I got for free of course, and is probably inaccessible to a majority of end users. Somehow I lucked out and wound up with the full, paid version of Tuxera when I purchased one of my four external drives, so NTFS formatting isn't really an issue when I'm doing cross-platform work. Alas, I simply don't have the internal hard drive space to accommodate multiple VMs. And Linux Mint MATE is awesome! I've played around with it before. I'd love to learn more about Linux...the problem is that the learning curve is pretty much a vertical line! And from what I've learned, it's the least secure operating system out there, at least "out of the box." I even experimented with Arch, but I think it'll be a long way off before I learn enough to get it set up properly. I hope to work towards a Linux+ certification if I can.

I have a friend who was telling me all about how he built his own machine and set up Hackintosh...it sounded pretty badass, and I'd love to go visit him and have him show it off to me.

I'm always running out of internal hard disk space, even though I have a 500 GB internal SSD. Basically about a year and a half ago I got my DNA's exome (regions that code for proteins) sequenced, in a frantic effort to unveil the genetic bases of certain supposedly genetic-based symptoms. You start out with raw 4 x 5GB files, but the pipeline is around 10-12 stages, and some of the stages take many many hours to complete on modern hardware. I think I'm just now actually getting close to having finished analysis to the point that I will have tangible SNPs from my DNA annotated, since I never owned sufficient hardware to actually handle it.

But yeah - I just tried using an external drive with my CentOS virt, basically replacing the folder on the internal drive with a symlink pointing to the new location of the files on the external USB drive. It actually performs pretty well. I'm using an external 250GB SSD drive though, which I don't regret buying now. Thanks for that pointer!

The nice thing is that learning Linux for the most part is genetically free-of-cost. The more you play with it, the more natural the command-line interface becomes, which is undoubtedly a key piece of learning Linux. Do you use the command-line in Mac OSX? It's probably I'd say about 75% the same in terms of commands that are identical in Linux, since both the OS families derive from Unix ultimately. There's a few exceptions like wget, apt-get (or yum), which are not in the OSX terminal, but it's a great way to practice if you aren't wanting to be confined to a virtual environmnent.

If I find any Linux resources that may be helpful, I'll definitely send you a message. One of my classes back in college was basically "C, linux command-line, and C++" which if I recall was semi-useful.

 

[Neramo]

Loved playing around with Linux and BSD on Vmware earlier, but now i prefer using Oracles VirtualBox. Prefer VirtualBox for playing around with, but would think twice about using it for anything else than testing

Got a 120GB SSD i'm not using atm, and trying to figure out if i'm going to use it for Dual Booting or a Virtual OS.

 

[23andaspie]

Loved playing around with Linux and BSD on Vmware earlier, but now i prefer using Oracles VirtualBox. Prefer VirtualBox for playing around with, but would think twice about using it for anything else than testing

Got a 120GB SSD i'm not using atm, and trying to figure out if i'm going to use it for Dual Booting or a Virtual OS.

A couple years ago at work all the RHEL5 developer desktops were gradually phased out by Ubuntu desktops running RHEL5 in VirtualBox (all new hires would be given a "virt" box). I never understood the details but I know it was due to the RHEL boxes being much more expensive than this other option.

Oh boy. Our RHEL5 images resolved to a particular semi-readable DNS internally; our Ubuntu boxes were assigned a hostname that was pretty much some garbled characters. Do you know how much frustrating it is when your development environments running on your RHEL virt server stop working, and you find out that your Ubuntu machine is mapping correctly to the correct IP address, but your RHEL isn't mapping back to the correct value?

I first tried vmware just this summer, and for the most part I do find it a pretty solid product. Of course, it's paid and unfortunately at this time I cannot purchase a license for it, but there is fortunately a way to convert from vmware format to virtualbox format, and vice versa (I originally ported from vbox -> vmware, then back vmware -> vbox).

Neither pass my quality bar though, because even though I have a MacBook, I have wanted to be able to run a virtual OSX instance due to having some commercial software I invested in that was bought for OSX, and of course neither of these programs are able to do that reliably.
VirtualBox just won't set up at all; vmware would set up, but the cursor would respond with at a huge noticeably lag, and then both of the times I had successfully installed the images broke soon thereafter. Go figure.

 

[wyverary]

Oh boy. Our RHEL5 images resolved to a particular semi-readable DNS internally; our Ubuntu boxes were assigned a hostname that was pretty much some garbled characters. Do you know how much frustrating it is when your development environments running on your RHEL virt server stop working, and you find out that your Ubuntu machine is mapping correctly to the correct IP address, but your RHEL isn't mapping back to the correct value?

Sounds like a virtual switch issue, and that is, in my experience, one of VirtualBox's most woeful inadequacies. VB is a good program if you're a home user and want to play around with different OS's, but in terms of power and features, it just doesn't cut it for the situations you are describing.

 

[Neramo]

A couple years ago at work all the RHEL5 developer desktops were gradually phased out by Ubuntu desktops running RHEL5 in VirtualBox (all new hires would be given a "virt" box). I never understood the details but I know it was due to the RHEL boxes being much more expensive than this other option.

Oh boy. Our RHEL5 images resolved to a particular semi-readable DNS internally; our Ubuntu boxes were assigned a hostname that was pretty much some garbled characters. Do you know how much frustrating it is when your development environments running on your RHEL virt server stop working, and you find out that your Ubuntu machine is mapping correctly to the correct IP address, but your RHEL isn't mapping back to the correct value?

I first tried vmware just this summer, and for the most part I do find it a pretty solid product. Of course, it's paid and unfortunately at this time I cannot purchase a license for it, but there is fortunately a way to convert from vmware format to virtualbox format, and vice versa (I originally ported from vbox -> vmware, then back vmware -> vbox).

Neither pass my quality bar though, because even though I have a MacBook, I have wanted to be able to run a virtual OSX instance due to having some commercial software I invested in that was bought for OSX, and of course neither of these programs are able to do that reliably.
VirtualBox just won't set up at all; vmware would set up, but the cursor would respond with at a huge noticeably lag, and then both of the times I had successfully installed the images broke soon thereafter. Go figure.

Haven't experienced that. But have a bad experience with Hyper-V. Had someone else who were administrating our server on Hyper-V for awhile. Then i had to take over a administrating the server, which had little diskspace left. To make a long story short, i messed up bad and snapshots got lots. Lost like ca 1. months work on the server. We could recover much from files on employers computers, but not all, and it took a lot of work, and a few customers got free hosting from us after that.

After that i i still don't wanna get near snapshots on any VMWare or Hyper-V servers In my defence, i didn't ask for taking over administration of the server, and it were more or less thrown at me. Anyway the feeling when i realised i messed up bad, is something i rather forget.

 

[wyverary]

Haven't experienced that. But have a bad experience with Hyper-V. Had someone else who were administrating our server on Hyper-V for awhile. Then i had to take over a administrating the server, which had little diskspace left. To make a long story short, i messed up bad and snapshots got lots. Lost like ca 1. months work on the server. We could recover much from files on employers computers, but not all, and it took a lot of work, and a few customers got free hosting from us after that.

After that i i still don't wanna get near snapshots on any VMWare or Hyper-V servers In my defence, i didn't ask for taking over administration of the server, and it were more or less thrown at me. Anyway the feeling when i realised i messed up bad, is something i rather forget.

If you're virtualizing servers and their resources are already quite taken up, you're better off just buying more servers. That sounds insane and you have my condolences for that crazy situation you were forced into.

 

[The Penguin]

My first experience of vitalization was in 2006. Out of all the products I tried, I liked Vmware Workstation the most. A few years ago I setup ESXi and having 3 VM runnning.

Virtualbox is a good product. It have improved a lot over the years.