Part 2 in a series on Virtual Box, How to Use it.

In Part 1. Virtual Box What it is? we explained what it is.

In this article we’ll demonstrate several uses for Virtual Box with examples we have created.

What can Virtual Box be used for?

Virtualbox can be used for a number of uses.  Here are just a few examples.  Virtualbox has been used for test and  development environment.  You could use Virtual Box for any number of test cases or situations where you decommissioned an old OS but still need to run a particular piece of software as a standalone service.

View the image below we have several VM (Virtual Machines) created.  Here are several VM’s running Elastix VOIP Server on Linux Cent OS, Windows 7  32bit and Ultimate, Windows 8.1, Ubuntu 14.04 running the Mean Stack. (MongoDB is the leading No-SQL database, Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application, Node.js is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications).

Here a few examples that I we will demonstrate and walk you through.

1. Play With Android On Your PC

Thinking of buying an Android device, but wish you could give the operating system a spin before you spend your hard-earned cash? Set up Android in Virtual Box to take a quick test drive. It’s possible thanks to AndroidX86, a port of Android to the PC.

You won’t get the full Android experience – notably, there isn’t access to the Android Marketplace. You will, however, get a feel for the default apps, and the system’s excellent integration with Google services such as Gmail and Google Calendar.

2. Windows 7 – Setup and install a version of Windows 7

First we need to get a iso copy of windows 7 so we can install this on our VirtualBox installation.  You will have to locate a copy of Windows 7 iso and then install.

3. Try Out Any Live CD Without Rebooting

Visit any of the popular Linux platform website and you will find version of the OS in iso format that you can download and install as a VM with Virtual Box.  Here is Distrowatch where you can go and download almost any Lnux Distro and install on Virtual Box.

We will setup and install a version of Linux Cent OS and take you to the command line and run some basic command once we have it install and setup.

The post How to Use Virtual Box – Part 2. first appeared on Cloud Engineer - Everton Collins.

This is a 2 part series on Virtualbox.

Virtualbox What it is? – Part 1.

Virtualbox How to Use it? – Part 2. – coming soon.

VirtualBox – is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use.  For a thorough introduction to virtualization and VirtualBox, please refer to the online version of the VirtualBox User Manual’s first chapter.

VirtualBox  virtualizer for x86 hardware, developed by Oracle and know as a well established solutions provider with products and solutions for every role in the enterprise.

A new VirtualBox installation on a mac laptop without any images installed.

End User Wiki Documentation (www.virtualbox.com)

In order to run VirtualBox on your machine, you need:

• Reasonably powerful x86 hardware. Any recent Intel or AMD processor should do.

• Memory. Depending on what guest operating systems you want to run, you will need at least 512 MB of RAM (but probably more, and the more the better). Basically, you will need whatever your host operating system needs to run comfortably, plus the amount that the guest operating system needs.So, if you want to run Windows XP on Windows XP, you probably won’t enjoy the experience much with less than 1 GB of RAM. If you want to try out Windows Vista in a guest, it will refuse to install if it is given less than 512 MB RAM, so you’ll need that for the guest alone, plus the memory your operating system normally needs.

• Hard disk space. While VirtualBox itself is very lean (a typical installation will only need about 30 MB of hard disk space), the virtual machines will require fairly huge files on disk to represent their own hard disk storage.  So, to install Windows XP, for example, you will need a file that will easily grow to several GB in size.

• A supported host operating system. Presently, we support Windows (XP and later), many Linux distributions, Mac OS X, Solaris and OpenSolaris.

• A supported guest operating system. Besides the user manual (see below), up-to-date information is available at “Status: Guest OSes“.

Best to check the Wiki on settings needed for current Operating Systems ie: Windows 7, 8, and soon Windows 10 or even Mac OX 10.

In Part 2 – Virtualbox How to Use it? We’ll give some specific examples of using Virtualbox to run several operating systems on your laptop or desktop computer without having to setup a new pc.

The post VirtualBox, What is It? – Part 1. first appeared on Cloud Engineer - Everton Collins.