VirtualBox Uses

[Mike McCall]

So, I've been playing around with VB recently and have setup several guests which include Win XP (though I haven't gotten it connected to the internet), Win7, OpenSUSE, Mint (software rendering only), and CentOS. Fun to play with and I can see how VM's will reduce hardware costs. But other than running various desktop OS's on a single machine, what are you actually using VM's for in your own environment?

 

[ohio_grad_06]

At work we are actually running a server with I think dual Xeons and 128gb of ram. We actually run a print server off of it, as well as I think a server that helps run our phone system, and probably a few other boxes also. I think we are set up VMWare ESXI though, but still, you can pretty much as long it's got enough ram etc, do most things with VM that you can with a physical box.

 

[Markverhyden]

I use VM's for building and testing production environments. All small scale. But, never the less, I want to be completely confident that the solution I have proposed works. I use ESXi as well, the free version. But you can do the same thing using VBox as long as there is enough underlying hardware support. Meaning processors and RAM. Regular desktops come up short unless it's a high end workstation.

 

[ZenTree]

Servers for customers the same as Mark, I also tend to use it for quickly messing about with little linux projects that I might use for a raspberry pi as it's quicker when testing (pihole, dietpi configs etc)

 

[Mike McCall]

I'm currently running VB on a Dell Optiplex 9020 i5-4570 3.2GHz, 16GB RAM, Win10 Pro. I'm not doing anything very demanding at this point.

I do have an old HP DL380 G5 in the basement, but don't want to run that thing any more than I have to. One thought I had is it would be great to run a small web server I could put PCRT on. So far (with Ubuntu server & CentOS), I'm started with a command line, which for me is more trouble than it's worth. It would be nice to be able to set that up and run it there though.

I can see using a VM as a test bed for new software I might want to learn or play with, but don't know enough yet to see how I might put it into useful production internally. However, I can also see how for a business looking to reduce hardware costs they might be able to run several different VM's to support multiple technologies on a single machine. Smaller scale use seems to be limited to learning/testing.

 

[brandonkick]

I use mine for a few different reasons....

I have an 8C / 16T Ryzen 7 machine with 16GB of ram currently.... plenty for at least the
host and one VM to run without any limitations. Keep in mind my main usage of the VM,
which I'll explain below.

Primarily, I use a virtual machine as a sandbox for VPNing into the network that belongs
to the company I work for. Since I telecommute, VPNing is the best solution. Once I have
a VPN connection established through my local VM, I then can RDP into my amazon AWS
workstation provided by the company. The reason I do it this way is to keep the "gateway"
machine as clean as possible. It has no other software except for security related and VPN
related. No networking traffic is shared between the host and the VM. There are no mapped
drives or shares, basically nothing "persists" between the host and the local VM. I have a
clone and a snapshot of the VM as well.

On a secondary basis, I do like to set up a few different "legacy" OS's just incase I need to
walk someone through something, or have some software that only plays nicely on an old
version of windows.

I currently have VM's running XP, 7 and 10.

I do plan to expand that to include 98 and a flavor of linux.


As far as benefits go, well for one it's much easier to perform disaster recovery on a VM.

For another, you have less hardware to "house"... but in that you have now a single point
of failure. As long as your snaps and clones are not stored on that machine, in theory you
could just install VMWare on a backup machine and migrate the VM quite easily. I've not
done this, but seems like it should be easy enough.

 

[Markverhyden]

Servers for customers the same as Mark, I also tend to use it for quickly messing about with little linux projects that I might use for a raspberry pi as it's quicker when testing (pihole, dietpi configs etc)

I do workstations as well. Comes in especially handy testing LoB stuff. Moved a dental customer over to AD early this year. So I was able to clone the server, test the migration, workstation connections, data backup and restore before going live.

 

[fencepost]

On a desktop? Not for much. At a client? This spring we put in a Dell T630 rackmount with 2x Xeon E5-2687W 12-core CPUs @ 3GHz (went with fewer cores at a faster speed based on the Microsoft core-based licensing changes, otherwise could have been I think up to 24-core CPUs at a comparable price point). Only 96GB of RAM, but also up to 32 2.5" SAS HDs, currently has 14 I believe in RAID 10 plus a couple hot spares. Running their terminal server, SQL server and an imaging server, 50 users signed on right now, CPU ticking along at ~11% and disk latency averaging 0.4ms.

There's more that I need to do there (probably bump their older server with larger drives in a RAID6 and move the imaging server off to that), but using VMs lets me leverage all that on a single piece of good solid hardware.

 

[mikeroq]

When I make a disk image of a customer computer I use disk2vhd. I do this so I can make a VM in Virtualbox and boot from their VHD. Typically when migrating to a new computer. Sometimes to try out fixes without messing up their machine

VMs for making images.
VM running WDS server for PXE booting.
Over the years various test VM like 98, 2000, XP, etc. Right now I have a VM running Sophos XG firewall testing it out.

 

[Mike McCall]

When I make a disk image of a customer computer I use disk2vhd. I do this so I can make a VM in Virtualbox and boot from their VHD. Typically when migrating to a new computer. Sometimes to try out fixes without messing up their machine

VMs for making images.
VM running WDS server for PXE booting.
Over the years various test VM like 98, 2000, XP, etc. Right now I have a VM running Sophos XG firewall testing it out.

This intrigues me. I downloaded Disk2vhd and made a VHDX and attempted to inport it into VB bus was unsuccessful as VB only inports ovf. Also made an image of a Win10 machine using Disk Management, but it too is not importable. How do I convert, import, or otherwise get such a file into VB?

 

[mikeroq]

This intrigues me. I downloaded Disk2vhd and made a VHDX and attempted to inport it into VB bus was unsuccessful as VB only inports ovf. Also made an image of a Win10 machine using Disk Management, but it too is not importable. How do I convert, import, or otherwise get such a file into VB?

A VHD is a virtual disk image, nothing more. Thus you cannot import it as a VM since it's not an OVF or a definition file for a virtual machine. You have to create a virtual machine then attach the VHD as the hard drive.
When creating a new VM:

Or add it in settings under storage.

 

[Markverhyden]

This intrigues me. I downloaded Disk2vhd and made a VHDX and attempted to inport it into VB bus was unsuccessful as VB only inports ovf. Also made an image of a Win10 machine using Disk Management, but it too is not importable. How do I convert, import, or otherwise get such a file into VB?

This is not a knock on VB. Oracle's maintenance of this app is a tremendous contribution to the IT ecosystem. But nothing breeds success like success. So, to start, I'd suggest you enable Hyper-V. It's part of W10 Pro. Since it's all in M$'s walled garden the probability of success is much higher.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/quick-start/enable-hyper-v

The basic concepts of VM's are the same irregardless of the platforms used. Just be aware that using OEM OS's will present challenges since upon boot they will know it's not the OEM hardware layer.

A general comment on VM's in general. For many of us our customer base does not need much in terms specs, RAM, HD space, etc, for a server. So carving up the resources of a low end server will still meet their needs. The resources I have for my ownCloud server easily meets that of a low end desktop.

For us the VM function is best in a Azure or AWS environment for clients. No hardware to worry about. Just backups and recovery to worry about.

 

[trevm999]

The uses for production servers are pretty obvious, but here's something I use virtualization for on my workstation:

I use Salt for configuration management so after I make new or edit configurations I test the configuration before committing the changes to version control.

I use Test Kitchen for this, and for Windows testing I use Vagrant + Hyper-V. So I tell Test Kitchen to run tests and it will create and bootstrap multiple OSes and then run the configuration and make sure it works. Depending on what you're doing, it can either destroy the virtual machines after or you can leave them running to test more configuration changes or connect to them and do some manual testing, etc.

I also create test cases for Test Kitchen, so not only do I test that the configuration successfully applies, I test to make sure it had the intended result. I.E. I make a configuration change that effects networking, and then in my test case I make sure I can ping Google or something.

And then if something like a software version changes, I can run my tests to make sure everything would appear to work properly. And if I ran my tests when the software was still in beta, I could make a bug report and then ensure that any bugs in the software that effect me won't make it into the released version.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I've also used virtualbox and disk2vhd to make a VM out of a desktop, saved my bacon more than once to put an old failing rig into a VM on the replacement. It gives you time to figure out what needs moved, great trick to have up your sleeve for that new client.

 

[GTP]

So, I've been playing around with VB recently and have setup several guests which include Win XP (though I haven't gotten it connected to the internet), Win7, OpenSUSE, Mint (software rendering only), and CentOS. Fun to play with and I can see how VM's will reduce hardware costs. But other than running various desktop OS's on a single machine, what are you actually using VM's for in your own environment?

I have Windows 7 guest running on a MAC client. The Mac does pretty much nothing, the Win 7 is running my business software, Teamviewer client, and 1 email account.

Edit: Forgot about using Disk2VHD to create VHD's of client machines, but that happens on a different comp running Linux .

 

[GTP]

Regular desktops come up short unless it's a high end workstation.

With respect, I disagree. I have run VBox VM's on some very underpowered laptops and desktops with AMD APU's and Pentium/Celerons etc.
Even CPU intensive tasks run fine, as long as you allocate at least 2 cores to the VM. Ram is the key. More is definitely better.

 

[glennd]

So, I've been playing around with VB recently and have setup several guests which include Win XP (though I haven't gotten it connected to the internet), Win7, OpenSUSE, Mint (software rendering only), and CentOS. Fun to play with and I can see how VM's will reduce hardware costs. But other than running various desktop OS's on a single machine, what are you actually using VM's for in your own environment?

VMs are great in a development environment. You can have a VM for every test case to see how your application performs in every possible environment. For example, machine with 1GB ram, a machine with 2GB ram, one with 1 cpu, one with 4 cpus, Win 10 home, Win 10 Pro, Server 2010 with dot net 3.5 etc etc.. all the way back to 2000 if you want. Basically every permutation you can think of to test against. Makes a lot more sense than having a room full of test machines with Freeze software on all of them.

 

[NJW]

My use cases are mostly covered above, I have VirtualBox VMs of Windows since XP and fire them up as required – I have no other Windows. Great for testing stuff, especially with the ability to take a snapshot at any time – like before I make a potential wrong move.

I used to prepare (sysprep) up-to-date images of Win7, but that's all but finished now. I also used to have a Genymotion Android emulator VM, but it wasn't much more than a novelty for me.

For larger scale virtualisation, containers are the way to go because they are more economical on hardware resources. The drawback with VirtualBox is that (particularly) RAM is ring-fenced for the VM, which rapidly eats into what's left for the host. CPU use is not so bad.

I'm inspired to give disk2vhd a try, so thanks to those that mentioned it again ITT.

 

[coffee]

Since I got my new high end workstation up and running I have been really using VB quite a bit. I have a Ryzen x1800 with 32 gigs ram and run a Mirrored OS and data is just Raid5.

I use one vm just for windows 7 for accounting with quickbooks, Turbo Tax, and some basic other windows stuff.
I use some other windows 7 for testing network connections and other settings and software - its my test bed.
I use Centos7 on another as a test bed.

I have an upcoming project that will be a server running centos7 and windows as a guest. What I have planned for backups is pretty cool. You can start / Pause / Stop VMs from the command line and this will be quite handy. I have been writing a bash script to shutdown the Windows VM and then export it to an appliance. Then it will restart the windows guest. Then after that is all done it will backup data from the linux server daily to a raid set. Then the backup is written to tape. The appliance is backed up on the weekend when they are not open for business. Pretty cool really.

I have not played with VMware as Im pretty happy with VB. It does everything I need it to do.

coffee

 

[trevm999]

I have an upcoming project that will be a server running centos7 and windows as a guest. What I have planned for backups is pretty cool. You can start / Pause / Stop VMs from the command line and this will be quite handy. I have been writing a bash script to shutdown the Windows VM and then export it to an appliance. Then it will restart the windows guest. Then after that is all done it will backup data from the linux server daily to a raid set. Then the backup is written to tape. The appliance is backed up on the weekend when they are not open for business. Pretty cool really.

I have not played with VMware as Im pretty happy with VB. It does everything I need it to do.

Your project is an example of it not doing everything you need it to do, like being able to do a live backup.