I use virtualbox all the time, and I have one production server running
under it. I use both Windows and Linux hosts.
I use it mainly for experimental stuff, because it is a bit
temperamental, but if/when things work out I can move them directly to
VMWare. It also can run P2V machines created with VMWare converter.
Updates tend to break it. Often. But I am always able to fix it, because
the community support is great.
The first thing you will see is how much less RAM a VM takes compared to
physical. Ubuntu guests shouldn't need more than 1GB, Windows guests
should start with 2. But only 4GB total is asking for trouble.
You have enough disk for dozens of guests. My advice is to throw an SSD
in there, it will speed up your guests 4 or 5 times faster compared to a
mechanical drive.
If you need to print from a VM, save yourself the trouble and use
TCP-IP. USB to VMs is very iffy. The shared folder thing works great. I
use it to store ISOs.
Kory Pounds <mailto:kory.pounds@xxxxxxxxx>
Tuesday, February 9, 2016 12:04 PM
Everyone,
I have received enough comments against partitioning to where I will start with virtualizing. This will at least give me a good feel of the Ubuntu environment along with basic operations before I, somewhere in the future, buy a laptop strictly for Ubuntu use. At that point I will be a little more prepared for serious/complex installations, system tinkering, compiling, etc.
Like Mike Bell suggested a while ago, I have been looking at Oracle's VirtualBox here:
https://www.virtualbox.org/
First, how much have each of you used this and how has it turned out for you? What are your positive and negative comments about it?
I have read over its documentation and am impressed of how it can run different types of OS's as guest at the same time for different types of host OS's. I am reading over the documentation and it has extreme flexibility which I find attractive, and I am not even a sys admin.
My Windows 7 Pro 64-bit Intel quad-core CPU platform has a 1TB hard drive and over 700GB is still free. As the documentation suggested, a fixed guest hard drive space allocation is suggested. This is easy to understand as there is less overhead and is more efficiency. So, for starting out, what HD space should I allocate? I know it can be adjusted later
The documentation states that a fixed RAM amount for the guest must be allocated. I have 4GB of RAM. As of this writing Windows is using 2.78 GB of it. However, my 7 tabs of Chrome that are currently open hogs up A LOT of that. For Chrome, each tab is its own process whereas with Firefox everything is under one process. However, both browsers hog up a lot. But I will probably put browser use on the Ubuntu side as I do everything on the Windows side, for now.
So how much fixed RAM do you think I should allocate for the Ubuntu guest? I know that fixed amount can be changed later.
Concerning RAM, will my Ubuntu guest environment use a little less RAM than Windows with such things as browser use or will it still be about the same? In other words, will an Ubuntu guest using VirtualBox be more efficient with its memory use?
Also, concerning CPU usage, will the Ubuntu side be more efficient with it and have less of a relative load on the processor than how Windows does with it while running at the same time?
It looks like that with using VirtualBox, I won't have to deal with hardware driver installations. I'll deal with that in the future with a dedicated laptop and learning that is another personal desire. But concerning software, will I still need to install Ubuntu versions of everything? I hope so because I want to get as much of an Ubuntu feel that I can. On the Ubuntu side, will I still sometimes need to compile from source for a few things as they come along? Again, I hope so, too.
This just came to mind: what about printing to my Canon printer from the Ubuntu side? I want to get used to doing that. What special setup, if any, will I have to do to get that to work?
I also read that I can assign a shared folder. I love that idea as I can point that to my user directory where I can access personal Windows documents, media files, etc, from the Ubuntu side. What do you think.
That's about it for now. Let me know what you think.
Kory Pounds
--
www.oncedead.com <http://www.oncedead.com>
It is not what you do that determines who you are, it is who you are that determines what you do.
