New to VM's would like some advice

craney5 said:

Hi everyone this is my 1st post so go easy on me lol, im currently studying for my A+ and would like to play around with a VM so i dont mess up my system, im running windows 7 and i was looking at using either virtualbox or vmware cant decide which one is better, also im going to install XP on the VM and was not sure how much HD space i should allocate for it? I have 4gb of ram also and planned on allowing the VM to use 512mb which should be enough wont it?

thanks for reading hope you can help

Craney

I've used both VMWare Player 3.0 and Sun VirtualBox and have had very good luck with both of them. The biggest advantage to VirtualBox is the ability to do snapshots...so if you want to take snapshots and come back to them...that product has a few more bells and whistles. However, VMWare Player 3.0 allows for the AERO interface on the VM and the VMWare Unity mode which allows you to run software installed on the VM as if it were a native application on the host machine.

Good news is that both are free to download and use and and you can install both of them and try them both out and see which you prefer.

As far as allocating disk space, both products create a small virtual file that can simply grow to a specified limit. So, you can allocate 80GB for the VM...and it will start the file small and grow if needed. So, most of my VM's are usually 5-8GB in size..even though they could grow to 80 if I wanted to install enough.

512MB RAM is enough for an XP virtual. You can adjust the RAM up and down as you need to. So, you can try it with 256MB and see how it works. If you need more, just shut down the VM, increase the ram to 512 and then fire it up and try again. If you notice that you don't really need 512, you can simply shut it back down and change it back to 256.

I think you will be surprised how easy and wonderful virtual machines are.

craney5 said:

I might sound dum here but could you use a VM as you main OS so to speak, wat i mean is i run windows 7 if i run a VM with XP could i use it as a main OS does it run like a normall version of XP so to speak?

Not a dumb question at all.

Think of a virtual machine as a physical machine, so pretty much just about anything you can do on a physical machine you can do on a virtual machine....with the exception of high end graphics stuff like games. And even that is coming along.

So, yes...you could have Windows 7 (or even Linux) on your machine host machine and do almost everything from within a virtual XP box that you install.

The great part about doing VM's, like you said, is that you don't screw anything up. For learning IT stuff, the ability to just create additional hard drives and play and test with things like software RAID, and simulating a hard drive failure and replacement within a virtual machine is fantastic.

Plus, if you get a machine where you want it, you can also back up the virtual hard drive file to a backup folder, and then do anything you want to the VM. Then, just copy your backup file back and you are right back in business. it's great for developing documentation or learning a procedure for something that is a bit tricky.

craney5 said:

Thanks so much mate, the only little prob i have is my xp oem is already installed on my other HD as a dual boot so dont think i will be able to use it in my VM not got much experience with linux but might give it a look

No, you won't be able to use that XP again. An OEM copy is tied to the machine it was originally installed on. The virtual machine will present all new hardware, thus it won't be seen as the same machine.

If you are serious about getting into IT and such, you might want to look into a technet subscription. With a discount code typically found online, for around $250 you get your hands on all of the Windows desktop OS's, server OS's and office applications. You can use these licenses and copies to install and activate over and over again without having any license issues. It's the way a lot of us on this board get our Microsoft software.