You can't say this is NOT technical!
http://abstrusegoose.com/18
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Trying the VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems
My Dell Inspiron 15 came with Windows Vista pre-installed and like most developers out there I was not happy with it. That made me buy a copy of Windows XP SP2, but it mysteriously did not work on my laptop. I have been hunting for a virtualization platform ever since.
Then I stumbled upon the VirtualBox from Sun. It was free for personal use and more than anything it was easy to use. Now my Inspiron runs an XP virtual machine, on the pre-installed Vista as a host. Thinking of all those virtual hard disk images I can save up for later, this is only a share of my happiness today.
The VirtualBox software for your operating system can be downloaded from here:
Ah yes, I am a little bothered about the 1.5 GB upper limit on the memory you can assign to VMachines. I guess we'll have to live with it as long as this is free.
Software installed on virtual machines may need as many copies of licenses purchased as the number of virtual machines created – the corresponding license texts should tell the detail. For e.g. I read, in a discussion on their VirtualPC platform on Vista and Windows 7, that Microsoft wants you to purchase as many licenses as you have virtual machines. The same logic should apply here I guess.
Quick Howtos
(I can only be cryptic here, but it's really simple)
Then I stumbled upon the VirtualBox from Sun. It was free for personal use and more than anything it was easy to use. Now my Inspiron runs an XP virtual machine, on the pre-installed Vista as a host. Thinking of all those virtual hard disk images I can save up for later, this is only a share of my happiness today.
XP taking a ride on Vista!
The VirtualBox software for your operating system can be downloaded from here:
What Can We Do With VirtualBoxes
- Create virtual machines that can have any operating system installed in it.
- Once configured, take snapshots of your VMachine. When needed restore your system state from these snapshots as required.
- Clone the configured virtual hard disks for safe keeping and to create more VMachines.
- One step further, it provides an SDK and a command line interface to show you the door open to platform virtualization and cloud computing. (I’ve not tried this myself!).
Ah yes, I am a little bothered about the 1.5 GB upper limit on the memory you can assign to VMachines. I guess we'll have to live with it as long as this is free.
Thinking Licenses
License for VirtualBox is free for non-commercial personal evaluation. For details read the license agreement on the download page.Software installed on virtual machines may need as many copies of licenses purchased as the number of virtual machines created – the corresponding license texts should tell the detail. For e.g. I read, in a discussion on their VirtualPC platform on Vista and Windows 7, that Microsoft wants you to purchase as many licenses as you have virtual machines. The same logic should apply here I guess.
Quick Howtos
(I can only be cryptic here, but it's really simple)
- Create a virtual machine
- Start Sun VirtualBox and from the console, start the wizard using Ctrl+N. Follow the instructions
- Use an existing virtual hard disk or create a new blank one and use it.
- Using an existing virtual hard disk
- Start Sun VirtualBox and from the console, start the Virtual Media Manager (Ctrl+D).
- Locate and add the virtual hard disk file (.VDI (VirtualBox), .VHD (Microsoft), .VMDK (VMWare), HDD (Parallels ))
- Choose this hard-disk when creating your virtual machine.
- Accessing a directory from the host machine
- On the VirtualBox console on the host machine, create a Shared Folder (not the usual Windows shared folder) and select the directory to share.
- On the virtual machine, navigate to My Network Places> Expand to access the shared folder.
- Cloning a virtual hard disk
- A virtual hard disk must be cloned, for two reasons. One, to correctly roll-up the disk snapshot you are cloning. Two, that helps use the same disk on two simultaneously running VirtualMachines. (That is, if/when you have to).
- You need to use the command line to clone a virtual hard disk. An example is below (VBoxManage is the utility and can be found in your Virtual Box installation directory)
C:\Users\ABC\.VirtualBox\HardDisks>VBoxManage clonehd C:\Users\ABC\.VirtualBox\Machines\WinXPImage\Snapshots\{52665bf7-57b0-49bb-a8a1-c1d91bfc46ff}.vdi WinXPwithVBoxGA.vdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.1.2 (C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
Clone hard disk created in format 'VDI'. UUID: d13ebf79-8879-4cbe-8922-9c6bf277f2b7
Monday, January 25, 2010
Yet Another Technical Blog!
Everything found at work, worth noting down, will be shared here. Topics mostly would be related to Siebel, Oracle's Fusion tools and application integrations. Please feel free to comment/correct/educate.
Everything discussed are personal opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect a strategy or commitment from a vendor or any of our clients.
To start with, I decided to equip this blog with the social content widgets and code syntax highlighting. Thanks to Salabh for these generous tips in his blog.
Testing syntax highlighting.
Everything discussed are personal opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect a strategy or commitment from a vendor or any of our clients.
To start with, I decided to equip this blog with the social content widgets and code syntax highlighting. Thanks to Salabh for these generous tips in his blog.
Testing syntax highlighting.
var theApp = theApplication;
if(theApp.GetProfileAttr("GUI_User") == "Y")
{
alert("YES");
}
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