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VBoxHowto

Introduction

Sun's Virtual Box is a useful way to run one or more virtual machines under the control of your main machine. You may, for example, use a Solaris or Linux workstation as your primary machine, but need to run MS Windows applications on occasion. Perhaps you need to test your software on multiple operating systems. There are many possible reasons why you might want to run a copy of another operating system as an application under your primary OS. This document is intended to help you get started with using Virtual Box on your machines using a Windows virtual machine image hosted by ECECIS.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, please make sure the following apply:

1. You have a supported system. This approximately means any OS running on an Intel x86-compatible CPU, including:
   1. MS Windows
   2. Mac OSX (only on Intel-based Macs)
   3. Solaris/OpenSolaris (on x86-based machines)
   4. Linux (most recent distributions)
   5. Source code is available for brave administrators of none-of-the-above.
2. You have root/administrator rights on your prospective host machine
3. Your host machine has adequate memory and disk space. Each virtual machine you run simultaneously will be a complete operating system and will require the resources of a complete OS. For example, a Windows XP virtual install will need at least 192MB of memory for itself (and more may be highly desirable). Disk space will be less of an issue for most modern machines, but you'll still want tens of GB of free space under most circumstances.

Installation

Download the appropriate Virtual Box binary image for your operating system, and install it as appropriate to your operating system. You will then need to obtain either an ISO image of the OS you intend to install as a guest operating system or an actual install CD

In particular, students wishing to install Windows 7 can download either the 32 bit or 64 bit windows install ISO image from ECECIS servers.

Configure guest OS

A virtual machine image will now needs to be installed and configured as if it were being installed on actual hardware. Step-by-step instructions are available for setting up a Windows 7 virtual machine. Installation of other operating systems will require many of the same steps.

A limited set of Virtual Disk images are available for faculty and staff use.

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