Hey all,
I was wondering how does clipboard-sharing work when using a hosted virtualized OS.
I mean, how would I go about writing such a bridge, for say a Windows host running a Linux guest?
In my experience, this only works when the "guest drivers / additions" are installed which enabled the host to communicate with the guest. I guess it's possible for the host to peek into guest memory and get the clipboard but that'd probably be much, much harder than a guest driver.
If you're not using a virtualization package that offers an SDK I think you'll be in for quite a task hacking from host to guest to peek into memory and processes.
Related
I don't know if what I want to achieve is actually feasible or not. I have an RTL8192CE wireless network Mini PCI card, which definitely doesn't work properly on Linux (running Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit (Precise Pangolin)). I have already tried everything I could think of: I downloaded the latest drivers from the Realtek homepage, tried using NDISwrapper with several different sets of Windows drivers, and also tried using generic wireless backports, etc. None of it solved my problem.
It does, on the other hand, work perfectly on Windows... I dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04, both 64-bit. Apparently, there is a bug in Ubuntu related to this card.
I want to know whether there is a way to use a virtualized Windows installation (Windows XP or Windows 7, preferably not Windows Vista) under my Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit that uses a native Windows driver (since the network card works perfectly in Windows). The virtualization software can be either VirtualBox (prefered), VMware or any other. There isn't any problem if I have to manually configure that by shell scripting or anything similar.
So, to make it clearer, I have a VirtualBox installed in my Ubuntu 12.04 (my host), which I use to run Windows 7 (my guest). I wanted to know whether this virtualized (guest) Windows 7 could have "direct" access to my wireless interface -- such as the dual-booted Windows 7 I have installed, without passing through the Ubuntu drivers.
Apparently I could not achieve that by using VirtualBox's guest additions, could I?
PS: I believe none of VirtualBox's networking modes (NAT, bridged networking, internal networking and host-only networking) would allow me to do that, am I correct? How could I solve that problem?
What you are asking for is called PCI Passthrough in VirtualBox - and it should be considered a very advanced topic. I have experimented with this feature before in VirtualBox and VMWare ESXi (make that vSphere...) and it can be extremely fragile.
I would suggest you spend some time reading the VirtualBox manual section on this (Chapter 9: Advanced Topics), there are some limitations you will want to be aware of as well as just know that this is an area of virtualization that is very young and immature. Off hand, here are some of the rather strict requirements before you can even begin:
Your hardware must have an IOMMU (Intel calls it VT-d, AMD -> AMD-Vi)
Your guest must be configured with hardware assist enabled (VT-x or AMD-V)
Your host Linux kernel must be built to utilize the IOMMU hardware
If your hardware/software meets those rather strict guidelines, give it a shot. What will happen is your guest will be effectively given direct access to your wireless PCI card and it will show up directly as a PCI device to your guest. You will install and use the drivers exactly as you would if Windows were your host operating system instead of your guest.
Reference - Chapter 9: Advanced Topics - PCI Passthrough
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#pcipassthrough
I'd like to ask anybody who has built a virtualized VS2010 environment in VirtualBox or VMware, which one was able to work out of the box without too much tweaking? Or both need workarounds to get stuff working?
Both are fine as long as you install the respective tools and drivers provided for the guest OS
If you're using VMWare Workstation, you can leverage even more out of the environment by installing Visual Studio on the Host PC, and using the Guest VM for debugging, if your application crashes you can actually rewind back to before the crash and step through your code with the same heap and stack before it crashed!
Basically, I suggest going with VMWare Workstation. It's pretty cheap (assuming you get paid to program) and has many, many awesome features that you'll come to love. If you're a hobbyist/student programmer however, you'll likely find VirtualBox to be a little more functional than the free VMWare Player.
As far as performance goes, Intel and AMD both have shipped chips with hardware virtualization since 2005/2006 respectively. This is called VT-x or AMD-V, and often has to be enabled in the bios on older machines.
Basically this means that your BIOS handles Memory and I/O virtualization on this chip, while specialist drivers (e.g. VMWare Tools) are installed to improve graphics and mouse performance - effectively this means the resulting VM has near native performance with minimal overhead.
Hope that helps!
You can work with a VS2010/Windows virtualized environment with no problems.
I've worked with such combination and I had no problems. Both VMWare and VirtualBox are stable so far since years and Windows OS virtualization works properly.
Obviously, you can have performance loss, because a virtualized OS has more bottle necked access to resources than a host one, but current CPUs from Intel and AMD have advanced virtualization instruction extensions which accelerates virtualization operations.
So... Just go ahead!
I don't know your requirement but there is also a great alternative using Win 7.
You can create a vhd file and boot on the vhd file.
A few steps more, you can create a base vhd file with everything you need, mark it as readonly and create as many differential disk as you want.
The drawback of this method are these ones :
it's a bit tricky to create the base and diff disk, because you have to do it in the setup console of windows setup (but google can help you)
there is a small performance impact on the disk I/O (but lower than the visualization environment)
you can run only one system at a time. In fact, nothing disallow you to install a virtualization software
you can't have your "host" and it's potential tools (corporate email, etc.)
but at least, the performance will be greatly better than a virtualization software.
I've bought a new notebook yet I'm not sure whether Linux fully supports it or not, so I decided to use a VM for the time being. The only virtualization software I've used so far is VirtualBox on linux, but I think it's a bit overkill for my needs.
All I need is to use it like a vps hosted on my machine. Command line access would be enough. It'd be nice if it's free/opensource and it's easy to configure.
Thanks.
VirtualBox + VBoxHeadless + Ubuntu Server edition works for me, I access it with winSCP/Putty and I don't have performance issue on notebook.
The Vagrant utility seems to be specifically designed to make it easy to do this. It requires you to have VirtualBox installed, but manages the configuration etc. You also could use the free VMWare Player and one of the ready-made VM images for it.
After having had a dev PC HD corrupt, I'm considering the idea of making my development environment be fully Virtual PC based.
The core items would be:
- XP Pro 32
- IIS
- VS2003
- VS2008
- SQL Server 2005
- Office 2003
Primary source would reside on a server in SVN with only a clocal copy on the VPC.
This would be for Windows based web and desktop development.
Assuming that the host machine has decent performance and provides for hardware virtualization, are there any known gotchas with such a setup, ie main pros and cons. Any performance issues or other issues that make this a good or bad idea?
I'd like to go this route so I can create a full backup VPC that can be put on a new PC if one fails and is repalced or copied to a laptop as needed for offsite work, etc. With the new Virtual PC features of Win7 this seems like it may be even better goign forward too.
Would like to get some feedback on this before we go down that road...
I wouldn't recommend Virtual PC because the performance is pretty disappointing compared to VMWare.
I've used a virtual development machine inside VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion on Mac for quite a while, and it works very well. It feels as if you're running on a dedicated machine.
My recommendations are:
Use a 64-bit OS as your host OS (Vista x64, Windows 7 64-bit, Mac OS X Leopord)
Have at least 6GB of RAM on your physical machine
Allocate 3GB of RAM to your VM for 32-bit, or more for a 64-bit guest OS
Pre-allocate the diskspace for your guest OS (no auto-grow)
Another advantage is that you can take your VM from a Windows-based VMWare Workstation to a Mac-based VMWare Fusion (and the other way around) without any problems.
I have been running multiple virtual development environments in MS Virtual PC and Virtualbox for 2 years now. I am doing mostly asp.net applications, some of the solutions are relatively large and use large databases which I also run inside the VM.
My observations based on this:
It is a good idea for exactly the reasons you mention and it works fine. Go for it!
768 megs of ram for the VM is enough, but more is better.
Have a Multi-core CPU.
Install the virtual machine additions for the guest OS. (This is basically like installing the proper drivers for your "virtual" hardware, and seems to be more important for performance than having hardware virtualisation support).
If possible, have the VM disk image on
a separate physical disk from the
host OS.
Use Virtualbox. It's free, and being developed rapidly. It might already be the best.
If you can satisfy the above, performance is no issue. Multiple Visual studio instances, IIS, SQL, Office, works just fine.
Running multiple copies of the same guest OS when it is a member of a domain/AD is tricky. If you need to do this you should read up on the sysprep.exe tool. Basically you can't just make a copy of the virtual disk, you need to take some special precautions.
Virtual PC is very convenient and it was what I used for starters, but I have to say that virtualbox seems to have overtaken it now. It was a bit rough in the beginning but the last few versions have really gotten there.
Virtualbox is fully free, and it has better features than VPC2007 - the main one that made me switch was the support for high resolutions. Virtualbox runs fullscreen on my 1920x1080 no problem.
It can also run virtual PC images, so switching was just a matter of installing virtualbox and adding my existing virtual PC disks to it.
An added benefit is that I can run the virtual images just as easily on my new mac as on the old pc.
The commercial options are not (anymore) worth what they cost, IMHO.
One thing you might have to consider is the lack of support for multiple monitors within the VM. I really like using multiple monitors, one for my source, the rest for all the rest. As far as I know, this is not possible in Virtual PC. Aside from that I can't think of anything that should hold you back, it's something I have been considering as well.
Regards,
Sebastiaan
VirtualBox from Sun is also a good choice. I am writing this from a Vista laptop with a virtualised Ubuntu dev environment.
One thing that Virtual Box is great for is having a seamless mode in which the guest OS application windows are presented as just windows on the host system, with a single common background (you get 2 status bars - one for Windows and one for Linux).
The Z-orders don't interpolate (ie all guest windows appear on the same Z plane in the host Window system, with their own Z-order within that plane) which can make it a bit odd, but you get used to it.
It is particularly useful if you need to build across many environments. VirtualBox is getting better and I now have an OpenSolaris environment and a FreeBSD one as well.
It is free as in beer which can be handy.
I actually run three development environments (and many test environments) under Ubuntu host in Windows guest virtual machines - it's very good for keeping things separated and for being able to restore test environments to a known point. It's also handy since the backup is a simple directory copy on the host and you don't have to worry about recovering settings or re-installing applications. etc.
I prefer VMWare over Virtual PC for both performance and usability (keep in mind that's my opinion). You don't need the VMWare Workstation product to create a VM - check out EasyVMX here for a way to create easy VMs.
The one thing you'll miss though is VMWare tools which only comes with the Workstation product, not the player. But VMWare has this for download here - I'm unsure of the legality of this even though it's an official download from VMWare, you may only be able to use it if you have the paid product.
I actually have a license for Workstation, it's just an earlier version and I prefer the latest Player.
What do you recommend for quickly creating images for testing a software product (that needs hardware access - full USB port access)? Does virtualization cover this? I need to be able to quickly re-image the system to test from scratch again, and need good options for Windows and Mac OS.
Virtualization may work for you as long as it is only USB access.
VirtualBox is available with USB support either for "private use or evaluation" or commercially and works on Win, Mac and Linux. USB support on Linux and Mac is somewhat sporadical though and does not work with all devices. VBox supports snapshots.
VMWare has one free product called VMWare Server for Win and Linux but I'm not sure how far USB support is included in their server products. For Mac there is VMWare Fusion but that's not available for free. Fusion should work with most USB devices. Workstation products for Windows are more expensive. I think there is a trial version for all of them. All do snapshots.
I don't know how far Parallels (Mac) supports USB devices or snapshots.
You don't need snapshot functionality if you can afford some short downtime between re-imaging. You can shut down the VM and then just copy the disk image (which is nothing else but one or multiple regular files) and start the VM again. Snapshots can be reverted to a lot faster (without rebooting).
If virtual machines will work for you, you can choose between Virtual PC, VMWare and VirtualBox.
Virtual PC supports Win host and Win/linux guests. Although there are some caveats with regards to the X resolution support.
VMWare supports Win, OS X and Linux host. It supports Win and Linux guests.
VirtualBox supports same hosts and guests as VMWare.
None of the three supports OS X as guest officially. The reason is that OS X is licensed only for Apple machines. However, there are some hacks that allow installing OS X under VMWare. It might be also possible to install it under VirtualBox or Virtual PC, although I have not seen specific instructions.
If virtualization is not good enough for you, you can use precreated installation images or a disk imaging program.
For precreated installation images for Windows, you can use the sysprep tool (search for sysprep or system preparation tool). I don't know if there are equivalent tools for OS X from Apple.
For disk imaging programs, I know quite a lot people swear by Symantec Ghost. I personally have not used it, so can't give you much info about it. There's also a list of disk imaging programs on Wikipedia, so you evaluate these as well.
Hope that helps.
If virtualization is right for you depends on how much access direct access you actually need.
But if virtualization works then vmware offers products for Windows and Mac that support a Snapshot feature.
Or there's also VirtualBox which works on Linux, Windows and Mac, also supports snapshots and is free.
I use VMWare Player for this sort of stuff. I've not tested it with the sort of access you discuss (since I mostly do apps rather than driver-level stuff) but the advantages are many, specifically being able to copy the VM when it's shut down for later restore to a specific point (sort of a poor man's snapshot) and being able to have lots of configurations without blowing the hardware budget.
It certainly provides USB virtualization and I would say it's the best bet for providing the full device access. I would suggest testing it since, if it provides the hardware support you need, it's a very good solution for the other reasons given. The only other (non-VM) suggestion I can think of which would match it would be hard disk image backups which can be restored at will.
I've used Virtual PC heavily for this kind of thing in Windows, without ever hitting any issues. It's free, which is always a bonus ;o)
Edit: Just re-read the question - not sure that it has USB support. Should tick all the other boxes though
CloneZilla is a great, free way to reimage machines.
Once I worked for some company where we needed to test our software for various combinations of versions of OS, SPs and some other libraries which our application was dependent on. For each separate identified combination we had a separate partition image created with the help of Norton Ghost (DOS version). All images were put to a server. Whenever a tester got the next version of the system core to test, they would just methodically restore from all applicable images, install the application, test it and report it.
This approach though a straightforward one would allow full access to the hardware and will provide you with 100% native installation.
Nowadays, I still use this approach for my private PC. I'm sure you can try the latest achievements like Hyper-V. We use it nowadays where I work. When we tried to install Team Foundation Server (the process is far from being easy) we also had to drop the process at some point and just restore a virtual machine from an image because we realized we made a few mistakes during installation. Conceptually the same approach that saves a great deal of time. I'm not really sure though how compatible a virtual PC is in the sense of hardware access.
You can try both approaches.
P.S. Today there are two Ghost products, Symantec Ghost (good old one) for corporate use and Norton Ghost for home use (bloatware in my opinion). If you decide to try this option, I would recommend the Symantec Ghost (part of Ghost Solution Suite).
If you can't just use a virtual machine and take snapshots of the fresh install then do a fresh install onto real hardware and use a disk imaging tool (Ghost comes to mind).
If cost is a factor then there's a few Linux live CDs that will do what you want. This comes to mind. Put a second disk in the machine and image from the second disk unless you have fast networks and network storage; it's way to slow to go to and from the network regularly. If you're using a Linux live CD then you can actually set the second disk to EXT3 so Windows won't detect it and assign a drive letter too.
If you have a dedicated workstation for testing then I would highly recommend Symantec Ghost. Simply get the workstation to the clean state, reboot to ghost and 'take a snapshot' of the HD or partition. You can then replace the HD or partition from the image say from CD or multicasted over a network connection from another PC.
I have used it for years now, even to the point of automating the build of 60 test workstations (at the same time).