Virtual machines using VirtualBox

Last updated on 2024-10-14 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • How do you import and launch a VM using VirtualBox?
  • How do you accomplish common tasks?
  • How and why do you change settings for a VM?

Objectives

  • Explain how to navigate the VirtualBox interface
  • Demonstrate how to run a VM
  • Show how to manage resources
  • Show how to take advantage of snapshots
  • Explore changing resource allocations

Introduction

Let’s now turn to exploring how to use virtual machines (VMs). There are many choices for running virtual machines, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The ones you may encounter more often are the VMWare family of products, Hyper-V which is included with Windows, Parallels which is a product for MacOS, and VirtualBox which is owned by Oracle Corporation and is cross-platform and open-source.

As part of the setup, you should have already have VirtualBox installed and running on your system before continuing.

Running the example VM

Users may be prompted to use the Basic or Expert interface. Make sure students know what they see may not be exactly what is on your screen

Exploring the UI - Run VirtualBox - import the VM - run it - see a desktop - proper way to stop the VM

Common tasks?

  • Suspend, resume
  • Snapshots
  • Mapping folders and hardware resources (?)

Challenge 1:

Take a snapshot of the VM. Start the VM and suspend it. Now Delete the parent snapshot. What will be the result if you boot up the VM again?

Todo

Managing VMs

Challenge 2:

Increase the RAM available to the VM to 2 GB (2048 MB). Verify it by running this command inside a terminal window

cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal

What number do you see? What should be the effect on the VM’s performance?

You should see 2014504 kB. Performance should increase, especially when applications are loading a lot of data into memory. Web browsers are especially heavy memory users.

Key Points

  • VM point 1