Ubuntu Tutorials

I am a big fan of VirtualBox as a desktop virtualization technology. I have it installed on my machine and I’m constantly using it to try out new distributions and learn new technologies. It really is a great tool! I have seen it grow from a new project into the fully featured, efficient virtualization competitor that it is today.

I was recently sent a copy of the newly released “VirtualBox 3.1 Beginner’s Guide“, which outlines deploying and managing a cost-effective virtual environment using VirtualBox. I want to thank Packt Publishing for sharing a copy with me, and I’d like to share my review of the book here. I hope some of you will take the time to check out the Packt Publishing website as a resource for technical books.

VirtualBox 3.1 Beginners Guide

The first thing I have to say about this book is that it is very detail oriented.  It truly is a beginners guide. I’m positive I could give this book to my father and he’d be able to install, configure and run VirtualBox on Windows or Linux. It outlines, in step-by-step detail, everything you’d like to know about VirtualBox. Even though I consider myself a Virtualbox veteran, I followed along with some of the tutorials and was impressed that no detail was left out.

One of the things that really stands out about this title is that it includes a huge number of screenshots. The number of screenshots in the book provide any beginner with the visual roadmap they need to complete the task at hand. It covers installing VirtualBox on both a Windows and Ubuntu host, as well as installing and configuring the reverse as guests. If you’ve never installed VirtualBox before, you’ll have an installation up and running in just a few minutes.

Beyond installation and configuration, this book goes into detail regarding the command line options (I learned quite a bit from this chapter!) as well. VirtualBox provides a full set of command line tools for starting, stopping, configuring, cloning and creating virtual machines. This makes it a perfectly reasonable candidate for a headless server virtualization solution!

This book covers guest additions, disk and image creation and management, all networking options and how they differ, using and creating virtual appliances, using snapshots and even remote management. It really is a good resource for getting started with Virtualization. I’m glad to have a copy of this book in my collection.

The sections that were the most useful for me were the networking and command line chapters. I was not familiar with any of the command line tools, and the networking was a little blurry for me. Before getting a copy of this book I was unfamiliar with virtualized networking beyond NAT and Bridged. This book went into enough networking detail that I’m very comfortable with each of the networking options and in what situations each might apply. This will really boost my efficiency and productivity with VirtualBox.

For anyone wanting to learn more about virtualization or doing research into cost-effective virtual environment solutions, I would highly recommend VirtualBox 3.1 Beginner’s Guide.

I want to thank everyone for the great feedback that I got on the poll regarding what you’d like to see on this site.  I think the results are pretty clear, although some of them did surprise me.  For those that haven’t taken a look at the results they are as follows:

Gnome Desktop Tips : 221 votes

Virtualization Topics : 163 votes

Installation & Upgrade : 163 votes

Security Related :152 votes

Ubuntu Server : 152 votes

3D Effects : 117 votes

Getting Involved : 69 votes

KDE Stuff : 65 votes

If you’d still like to voice your opinion the poll is still up for another day.  You can also comment on this post if you’d like to see topics not listed in the current poll.

I will try to keep these results in mind going forward.  I have seen website traffic go up recently, and I’m glad to see people are interested and coming to read the site.

A new poll will be starting July 1 so please come and give me your feedback at that point.

You’ve been seeing a lot of virtualization specific posts recently here at Ubuntu Tutorials.  I’ve been tinkering with a number of virtualization options, namely VMware Server, Virtualbox and now KVM with Virt-Manager.

I’m not going to go into comparing the three in this post, but I will say that KVM is the only solution that will let me run 64bit guests on my 64bit host.  It also cleanly manages networking, whereas VirtualBox still has issues there.  KVM is still fairly new however so the UI features are not as nice as the other two.

Installing The Packages

Assuming your machine will support KVM (generally, core 2 duo and later) lets get the right packages installed.

sudo aptitude install kvm virt-manager libvirt-bin

This will install the Virt-Manager graphical interface for creating and managing your virtual installations.  It’ll also install the kernel module to make use of the KVM instruction set and the libvirt library.

Initial Setup

Once you’ve got the right packages installed you’ll need to give yourself access to the KVM device.  This is done simply enough using:

sudo gpasswd -a username libvirtd

This will require you to logout and login again.  When you get back we’ll get Virt-Manager launched and some virtual machines built.  Go ahead, relogin.  I’ll wait…

Running Virt-Manager

Virt-Manager is a nice kvm/qemu/xen management interface developed by the good folks at RedHat.  This utility makes it really easy to create, manage and delete virtual installations.  You can launch Virt-Manager via the command line, or the Applications menu.

virt-manager

Troubleshooting

If you have VirtualBox installed you may run into conflicts between the kernel modules.  Make sure to remember to remove the conflicting module before you run either of the virtualization solutions.  You can do this by using these commands.

To remove the VirtualBox module:

sudo modprobe -r vboxdrv

To remove the KVM module:

sudo modprobe -r kvm-intel

Enjoy.

Updated: added user to libvirtd group instead of kvm group. Removed launching with sudo.

UPDATE: This post has been updated for VMware Server 1.0.5 on Ubuntu 8.04.  If you are running Ubuntu 8.04 you’ll need to follow those instructions.

My previous tutorial on installing VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.10 has been wildly successful but I also realize now that it has become a bit out of date. This tutorial is an update with a few simplified steps. It will be nice when VMware Server makes it into canonicals partner repository (as is available on Ubuntu 7.04), but until then these few steps should work for most of us.

As an update from the previous post, for those that are curious, here is an explanation. At the time of that writing there was a slight issue with the current kernel that required the suggested patch. Since that post was published the kernel has been updated and the patch no longer needed. It doesn’t appear to conflict with anything if it is run with the patch, but I felt that this warranted an updated tutorial.

Installing VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”

1. Download VMware Server from the VMware website.
2. Unpack the contents of the archive to your system (perhaps /tmp)
3. sudo aptitude install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-$(uname -r)
   
4. Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), cd /tmp/vmware-server (or wherever you unpacked the archive)
5. sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Answer all of the questions presented to you. The defaults should be fine if you are unsure about any. When everything has finished you should be able to launch VMware Server from your desktop menu under Applications > System Tools.

The last step in the installer should ask you for your VMware Server serial number. While VMware Server is free (free as in beer) it does require a serial number to use and is not free software (free as in freedom). If you need a serial number generated you can register for your VMware Server serial number(s) here.

UPDATE: This tutorial has been updated to half as many steps.  Please use the updated tutorial available:  Installing VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” : Updated.

UPDATE: For those running VMware Server 1.0.3 there is an updated version available.

As I mentioned a few posts ago (How to Install VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.04) I would be outlining how to install VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.10. These steps are a bit different from Ubuntu 7.04, as the canonical commercial repository is not up to date with the alpha releases of Ubuntu 7.10. There is a workaround however that can help you get VMware Sever installed.

Installing VMWare Server on Ubuntu 7.10

1. Download VMware Server source from the VMware website.
2. Download this installer patch. (source reference)
3. Extract all the archives to some location on your system (tar -zxvf VMware-server* ; tar -zxvf vmware*)
4. Ensure that you have build-essential installed in order to compile these sources (sudo aptitude install build-essential)
5. Install the xinetd server (sudo aptitude install xinetd)
6. Run sudo ./vmware-install.pl located within the vmware-server-* unpacked archive.
7. Select all the default options *EXCEPT* do not compile the modules at this point. (Do you want this program to try to build the vmmon module for your system? NO)
8. Run sudo ./runme.pl located within the vmware-any* archive. This will launch step 8.
9. Select the default options and this time answer YES to compile the proper modules.
10. Run vmware-server using the command vmware or via your Applications Menu.

Basically, at this point, VMware Server needs to be installed manually from source until the canonical commercial repository catches up and Ubuntu 7.10 is final. Until then this should work for manually installing.

note: if you update your kernel you will need to re-run the scripts to regenerate and recompile VMware Server for your updated kernel. I’m guessing this close to beta and final releases that we wont have any more kernel updates.. but I’m sure that will soon prove me wrong. Just be aware.

UPDATE: This tutorial has been updated to half as many steps.  Please use the updated tutorial available:  Installing VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” : Updated.