This week in the world of virtualization: Sun’s VirtualBox
This week I had the pleasure of taking some personal time to play around with Sun Microsystem’s VirtualBox. What else can I say but, “Wow.” I am impressed with this excellent application. I had downloaded (v2.1.4) and configured it for Fedora Linux on my laptop. It was extremely simple. It came as an rpm and the installation took care of everything, including adding the shortcut launchers in my GNOME menu.
I had wanted to install a virtualization application for quite some time now to help make development life simpler. I do a lot of low-level device driver development and for that reason I had invested (years back) in multiple dummy nodes to do my testing on. Well, not only do those nodes take up space and consume too much power but when I hit kernel panics, I do not want to have to wait for the system to restart and re-initialize for me to continue with my work. I want something simplified and that is where virtualization comes into the scene.
This may sound a bit redundant but some of you may understand why I am doing this. I wanted to virtualize and install Red Hat Advanced Server 5.1, so I can continue developing my drivers locked into that kernel tree. This will also aid in my being an ISV with Red Hat when completed, tested and released. That way I do not have to mess with any external hardware.
Setting Up for a Guest Operating System
When the application first loads and you are starting from scratch you must first create a guest PC profile. In this profile you allocate the amount of total physical memory the virtual guest has when running to even the hard disk space. The best part of this virtualization stuff is that you can create virtual disks as image files saved on the local host. You can set the size limits on this.
Once the profile is set you are ready to start the guest profile and begin installing the operating system. This can be done through a number of methods, I chose a CD/DVD method and had my RHAS5 ISO files mount as a CD-ROM drive. In VirtualBox you are given the option of reading the CD/DVD from the local drive or to load the ISO files instead. No other work necessary until you have to change the media device (i.e. select a different ISO image). The installation could not have gone any smoother. It installed like it was on its own server.
The process reminded me of how great UNIX/Linux can be without needing to write the ISO files to CD-Rs.
Loading the Guest Operating System
Everything loaded and functioned like a dream. I was able to access the attached network and it recognized all of my enabled hardware. VirtualBox allows you to enable/disable hardware components from being seen by the Guest Operating System. Overall performance seems great (so far). I have yet to do any real application processing.
There was only one thing that set me back and that was trying to figure out a way for me to access the tty console outside of X (via CTRL+ALT+<F key>). After a quick Google search, I had seen how you must use this <Host Key>+<F Key> to simulate such functionality. The host key that I speak of is a key to allow the virtualization application to understand whether you want to use the keyboard/mouse on the Host or Guest operating systems. By default it is set to Right CTRL and can be changed to anything else. It does not take the user long to get used to it. Technically it only becomes truly necessary when using the mouse. With regards to the keyboard, as long as the window that is running the Guest operating system is set to active, it will take control of the keyboard (for the most part).
Conclusion
While the concept of virtualization has been around for more than a couple of decades, I am just impressed as to how popular it has become in the last 6 years or so. It makes sense too. Companies invest thousands of dollars in these high performing servers which once configured with an operating system only utilize 10-40% (I just made up those numbers) of its resources. You have all this unused real estate that can be used to run other things. Also, with this whole push of going green, it gives system administrators all the more reason to consolidate on to fewer systems and save money on energy costs that would be wasted in running all those operating systems on seperate machines.
Last year in October, I had attended a Red Hat “Road Tour” Seminar and the primary focus of the company was very clear. Focus was on middleware and virtualization. This was also during the acquisition of Qumranet for their IP in KVM. I have tinkered with other virtualization tools here and there but so far, I am most impressed with this. Great work Sun Microsystems! To date, I don’t think I have ever come across a Sun product that I was disappointed with.
