Virtual machine deployment. VirtualBox

We continue our introduction with virtual machines. Previously, we have already installed and deployed a VMware Workstation virtual machine. For this article, we're going to get acquainted with another no less popular virtual machine, which is VirtualBox. So let's get started.

The installation process is the following:

1. Go to https://www.virtualbox.org/ and in the «Downloads tab», download the file for the operating system used.
2. Open the file and start the installation.
3. Select the options that you want or do not want to install.
4. Finish the installation.

This is how the program window will look like after installation.

Virtual machine creation

1. Click «Create» in the tool window.
2. Enter a name for the virtual machine.
3. Select the type and version of the operating system to be installed. In our case, it is Windows 7 64-bit.
4. Specify the amount of RAM that will be allocated for the virtual machine (at least 2 GB is recommended).

In order to prevent the virtual machine from being too «heavy», it is better to allocate no more than 50% of the memory available on the main PC.

1. Specify the hard disk parameters and select the file type of the machine's virtual disk. If necessary, you can find more hard disk configurations in the «Expert mode».
2. Select the storage format (in our case, it is «dynamic»).
3. Click the «Create» button.

The virtual machine has been created and is displayed on the left of the list.

Next, we need to launch the virtual machine. It order to do this, click the «Start» button. Since the operating system has not been installed on our virtual machine yet, we need to specify the path to the installation disk. This path can be changed by clicking on the button with the folder. Specify the iso file that has been prepared in advance and click «Continue».

The next step is to go through the usual Windows installation procedure. It won't be described in detail, as it may differ depending on the OS. Below, you can see the installation procedure for the OS we have chosen.

Here is a basic installation of Windows 7 on a VirtualBox virtual machine.

All files of the installed OS (both system and personal) are stored on the PC's hard disk. The name of this folder is VirtualBox VMs. The storage location can be changed in the program settings. You can also find snapshots (snapshots of virtual machine states) in this folder.

With this instruction, we conclude the series of articles on deploying virtual machines.