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Table of Contents
VirtualBox
VirtualBox is a free/opensource Hypervisor from Sun Microsystems. It has performance on par with VMware and is very mature. We have two virtualization servers, biovbox and biovboxtesting.
Create a VM
Copy an ISO to your home directory:
$scp ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso alan@172.26.0.200:~/
- SSH to VM server: 172.26.0.200
$ ssh alan@172.26.0.200
- start the virtualbox application
$ VirtualBox
- Follow the wizard to create a VM with the following properties:
- Base Memory: less than 512 MB
- Network : NAT
- Hard disk size: less than 30Gb
Networking
Bridged Networking
If your guest is using bridged networking you MUST use this command to allow other users to use the host's physical network card. Make sure your virtual machine is shut down and then run this command:
VBoxManage setextradata MyMachine VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/RestrictAccess 0
Each and every VM using bridged networking must use this command. If you are seeing errors like VERR_PERMISSION_DENIED
regarding the network interface, this is the cause!
As of VirtualBox 3.1.2 this is still a known issue.
Port Forwarding
If your guest OS is using NAT for networking and you want to access services like Apache or SSH, you will need to enable port forwarding. There is no GUI for this in VirtualBox, but you can use VBoxManage setextradata
to make the required changes. If you want to SSH to your VM, for example:
$ VBoxManage setextradata Ubuntu "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" 2223 $ VBoxManage setextradata Ubuntu "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" 22 $ VBoxManage setextradata Ubuntu "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" TCP
Then you can log in to the VM from your own computer using the port you've forwarded above:
$ ssh -p 2223 username@172.26.0.200
Commonly-used commands
List your VMs
$ VBoxManage list vms
List your running VMs
$ VBoxManage list runningvms
Updating VirtualBox
Stop any running VMs
Either shut down or "save state" for any running VMs. First, find any users who have "headless" VMs:
# ps aux | grep -i VBoxHeadless jmagochi 4939 3.9 3.5 759372 72268 ? Sl Oct05 402:13 /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxHeadless -s nobu jmagochi 4991 12.5 3.2 621588 67632 ? Sl Oct05 1281:41 /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxHeadless -s lims aorth 18431 9.7 1.7 998940 36160 ? Sl Oct11 129:54 /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxHeadless -s b0237553-9653-4461-bd0e-d4d316c16d4f -v off
As the user who owns the VM, save the VM's state:
# su - jmagochi $ VBoxManage controlvm nobu savestate Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.8 (C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation All rights reserved.
0%…10%…20%…30%…40%…50%…60%…70%…80%…90%…100% $ VBoxManage controlvm lims savestate Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.8 (C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation All rights reserved.
0%…10%…20%…30%…40%…50%…60%…70%…80%…90%…100%
$ exit # su - aorth $ VBoxManage controlvm b0237553-9653-4461-bd0e-d4d316c16d4f savestate Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.8 (C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation All rights reserved.
0%…10%…20%…30%…40%…50%…60%…70%…80%…90%…100% $ exit</code>