Lab 15: VirtualBox Exercise

 

Objective

To get practice using a hypervisor and setting up virtual machines.

 

Task

For this lab, you should install the VirtualBox hypervisor software. This is a type 2 hypervisor, so it runs under a regular operating system, as a typical desktop application. They support Windows, Linux, OSX, and Solaris hosts. (Solaris is a version of Unix made by Oracle, the same company which makes VirtualBox).

We'll install Debian 13 on our virtual machine. You can download Debian 13 from the Debian website. The download link on the main page will work.

Next we'll setup the virtual machine:

  1. Under VirtualBox, click New to make a new VM.
  2. Call it whatever you want, and under the ISO image, select the Debian 13 .iso file you downloaded.
  3. Make sure OS is set to Debian.
  4. VirtualBox can automatically install known OS images, such as Debian 13. If you choose this option, you'll put in options for the install on the dialog page. Be sure to install guest additions.
  5. If you don't choose this option, you'll interact with the OS installer as if you were installing it directly on a computer.
  6. Specify how much of your hardware (CPU's, RAM, and disk space) to allocate to the guest OS. The defaults provided should be sufficient for this step.
  7. Review the information and click finish.

When the installation is complete, you will have a virtual machine running on your machine. You should be able to login with the user and password you set up and see the graphical desktop. You could use this for trying out different operating systems, developing applications, and so on.

 

Submitting

Submit a screenshot of your virtual machine running on your machine in Canvas.