Hot answers tagged virtualbox
29
Windows is a bit different, see How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox for a guide.
From memory you can use VMware's converter and VirtualBox will read VMDK files.
For Linux, if you want the easy solution, boot a live CD,
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/images/sda1.img bs=1024
Do that for every partition mounted in /etc/fstab of your ...
19
As of VirtualBox 4.0.0, the VBoxManage command line tool offers a simple resize option:
VBoxManage modifyhd /path/to/vdi --resize <mbytes>
After the virtual disk container resize, boot into the VM and resize the partitions to make use of the extra space.
See also: VirtualBox manual, Chapter 8. VBoxManage: modifyhd
19
Xen will generally perform much better than VirtualBox because VirtualBox runs the guest OS in a way that the guest OS does not know it is running in a virtual environment. Or to put it another way, the guest OS is not modified to run virtually. Because of this, VirtualBox has to 'trap' kernel type instructions, run some custom code and then return control ...
17
Since I don't have 50 reputation points I can't comment on Hamish Downer's answer but he is mistaken on his last point. Xen can run unmodified guests however they have to be run as HVM guests which are fully virtualized. Doing this requires that the host computer has hardware virtualization support with Intel VT or AMD-V capable cpu's.
Xen and Virtualbox ...
17
One notable thing that I feel has been left out is that VirtualBox is an entirely different class of virtualization. VirtualBox falls under the category of "workstation virtualization" (also known as Desktop virtualization) which is fine and dandy, but it doesn't really compare to Microsoft's Hyper-V or VMWare's ESXi.
Hyper-V, ESXi, KVM, and Xen are all ...
14
It is possible to boot your Windows installed on your computer in a VM running on a Linux installed on the same computer. The only thing to remember: do not mount a partition on both OS. I've used this setup in qemu, kvm and VirtualBox.
EDIT:
The ideea is to use the entire physical disk and be careful not to mount the same partition twice (like booting the ...
12
'Guest Additions' is a bundle of support tools and drivers that allows VirtualBox to interface directly with the OS to enable certain features, such as automatic mouse-out and accelerated graphics.
I've not had an issue with Linux on VirtualBox, and I've tried a half dozen different distributions including Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and CentOS.
Ehtyar.
11
Is it possible to use Virtualbox to boot from that old real drive instead of from an image?
Yes. VirtualBox has support for using a raw host hard disk from a guest since version 1.4. As of version 2.2.0, it is still listed as an experimental feature. It is described in section 9.10 of the user manual for VirtualBox 2.2.0.
There are some instructions ...
11
There is no simple way to do this that I'm aware of. There's no app that lets you just adjust a number to increase the hard drive size. However, there's a pretty easy tutorial on modhul.com that walks you through a process similar to what others have posted here.
Basically, you:
create new virtual disk with larger size
add that drive as a slave to your ...
11
I don't know if it is possible to boot a vdi file but you can convert VDI file to raw image:
VBoxManage internalcommands converttoraw Fedora14.vdi Fedora14.raw
You must remember though that this is a whole drive image, so just copying it to a empty partition won't work, you can copy using Windows version of dd to a spare disk and boot that.
If your Fedora ...
11
Dump VIrtualBox and use a proper virtualization technology.
To start with:
it crash!
Ok, now I am not used to VirutalBox - I use Hyper-V and have experience with VmWare, and outside a power or hardware failures I never had any of my servers just crash.
You likely have borked drivers.
Proper server virtualization products support autostart. Xen, XVM, ...
10
I would put your VM images on a seperate spindle. Having them on a seperate disk with a large cache is likely to yield a much larger performance boost than which filesystem you use.
Given that a corruption in a VM image could be catastrophic, I would be looking at robustness of filesystem over performance. Is it likely to survive a power failure, for ...
10
I could find my Headless VB with the combination of following commands:
# Update arp table
for i in {1..254}; do ping -c 1 192.168.178.$i & done
# Find vm name
VBoxManage list runningvms
# Find MAC: subsitute vmname with your vm's name
VBoxManage showvminfo vmname
# Find IP: substitute vname-mac-addr with your vm's mac address in ':' notation
arp -a ...
9
My suggestion would be to go with ESX/ESXi -- You presumably already have a substantial investment in VMWare knowledge in-house, and those skills mostly transfer over to managing ESX/ESXi. In addition if you ever want to leverage the advanced features of the VirtualCenter platform an already-installed ESX environment is a great starting point.
The other ...
9
I have successfully used qemu-nbd (which comes with the qemu package) to access VirtualBox .vdi disks.
First you make sure that the nbd kernel module is loaded with the max_part option set to a number high enough to accommodate all the partitions in your .vdi image:
# rmmod nbd
# modprobe nbd max_part=16
Then you use qemu-nbd to attach the image:
# ...
9
The Gold Standard for server virtualization is VMWare VSphere (ESXi). Microsoft's Hyper-V Server is a close second. Both are free (as in beer) for their basic editions.
VirtualBox is great for testing, but it lacks many of the enterprise features available in VMWare of Hyper-V. Similarly Xen is a great platform, but lacks some of the flexibility you get ...
9
As cpuguru said, you need to config the network. So login on your centos and execute:
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
As Chris R explained, you should edit the contents of that file to end up having this:
DEVICE="eth0"
HWADDR=MAC Address*System MAC*
NM_CONTROLLED="no"
ONBOOT="yes"
BOOTPROTO="dhcp"
Then save (escape :wq INTRO) and then ...
8
Another workaround is to run the following command on your host:
VBoxManage setextradata VM_NAME VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/SHARE_NAME 1
Or on Windows
VBoxManage.exe setextradata VM_NAME VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/SHARE_NAME 1
where VM_NAME is the name of your virtual machine (e.g Ubuntu) and SHARE_NAME the ...
8
"I am in the process of de-virtualising everything" - really? o_O why?
FWIW of your two suggested approaches, I'd migrate it but I'd be more than a little bit wary of this approach personally.
Your question is a little unclear: does the VM run now as it is? Unless you're having an actual problem other than being wary of virtualisation, my real suggestion ...
8
You don't mention what the underlying disk is like on these servers, but these type of performance issues are nearly always IO-related. What are the IO stats looking like when you're running multiple builds versus just one?
Additionally, you'd get much better performance out of your hardware by using something like Xen or VMware ESXi as opposed to ...
8
You can work around this issue in one of two ways, both of which are in the VirtualBox manual:
Enabling DNS proxy in NAT mode
The NAT engine by default offers the same DNS servers to the guest
that are configured on the host. In some scenarios, it can be
desirable to hide the DNS server IPs from the guest, for example when
this information can ...
8
Here is the quote from VirtualBox documentation:
Enable I/O APIC
Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controllers (APICs) are a newer x86 hardware feature that have replaced old-style Programmable Interrupt Controllers (PICs) in recent years. With an I/O APIC, operating systems can use more than 16 interrupt requests (IRQs) and therefore avoid IRQ sharing for ...
7
You might need it when migrating a physical machine to a virtual machine, if the physical machine has an IO APIC. Most modern machines do.
A standard installation on a modern physical PC or VMware will usually result in Halaacpi.dll being chosen as most systems nowadays have an IO APIC and VMware chose to virtualize it by default (VirtualBox disables the ...
7
Alternatively you can use 'rsync' to transfer just the files you need, drop that onto a Linux system located at your home, fix up things like the Master Boot Record (MBR) which will not be correctly transferred and then fire it up under a virtualization technology.
You will be looking for something like;
rsync -vaHPS --numeric-ids --exclude=/proc ...
7
Virtualbox does actually support importing VHD file, unfortunately this is only for VHD's created with Virtual PC, not Hyper-V, which adds some additional information to the VHD. Some people have successfully got VHD Vm's to boot by ensuring the VM in Virtualbox uses an IDE rather than SATA controller.
I'm not aware of anyway to convert VHD's straight into ...
6
I would recommend VirtualBox. It's capable on many levels, easy to use, and free. And yes, use your current servers until you run out of capacity, which will probably be farther down the road when you expect and you'll have a better idea of what you need to expand and grow.
6
If you're looking at setting up a dedicated server for your Devs to use I would recommend VMware's ESXi. It's free and fairly easy to setup but it does run on the bare metal so you would have to blow away your server or install VMware Server on your 2008 server to play with ESXi before hand.
VMware workstation, VMware Player and Virtual Box are all good ...
6
Paraphrased from John's answer, "Treat the virtual as you would a physical machine". Any software/method to backup while running will work. You may also want a backup of the virtual machine's configuration file (.vbox) if the backup method doesn't already include it. Most bare-metal backups are done without the standard system running. Most ...
6
You can't run 64-bit guest using VirtualBox on hardware without VT. Seems silly that you can't run the same type as your host without VT, but you can't. Either use 32-bit guest or buy hardware that supports VT. You might also want to look into a para-virtualization solution like Xen which can run 64-bit without VT. Also VMWare may be able to emulate 64-bit.
...
6
In my experiences, virtualbox is more for running a virtualized desktop system, not a server. IT's great for things like running VMWare ESXi which needs to be managed from Windows, but I only had a Linux system, so I virtualized Windows to run the tools. Or it's great for testing things. But I wouldn't run a server from it for production because I really ...
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