Virtualbox is a high performance and customer oriented virtualization product for both enterprise and home user. The fun fact is it is open source software with General Public License Version 2. As a home user anyone can get all the features working and can get the full advantage of this powerful software.
This software currently works on various kinds of operating systems with the ability to guest operating systems like windows, Linux, Solaris, OS/2 and OpenBSD. Different operating system required different architecture in the virtual machines, so we need to define the operating system at the beginning of crating the virtual machine. For the system administrators it is very easy going software to create a test environment or even a demo environment for the various purposes.
Another fun fact about virtualbox is, it is continuously developing and almost in every 6 months it is releasing a update for the users. So if we keep the update option active in this software it will work as a charm for the users.
Let’s create our first virtual machine:
Double click on the virtualbox software that installed on your computer. (See the link how to install virtualbox). Now you will get a window like shown below:
Now navigate the new button on the top left of the window. Click on the new icon. After that a new window will bring up.
In this step we need to fill up the Name of the virtual machine, also select the type of operating system we are going to install on this virtual machine. Then select the version of the operating system will be installed by mentioning the bit rate of the operating system like 64-bit or 32-bit. After filling up all those things click on next. We will be on the next step of the process which will look like:
We need to take the memory as it is recommended for the operating system on the official website of that ISO file. It is important to know about the memory first because it is a very important part of the operating system. Now for centos 7 the recommended RAM is 2GB but I am using 1GB as I am going to install the minimal package ISO. Then click next and here the storage part will come up.
Here we will not get these three options, for the easy convenient approach I selected to “create a virtual hard disk now”. Usually it is normal that you would not have any virtual hard disk created before you create a virtual machine. Then click on create and you will get a new window for creating a virtual hard disk.
On this step we will select virtual disk image (VDI). Why! Because we the rest of the disk types have some issues. As VDH is a virtual hard disk, which means it will have a fixed size and either you use it or not that much disk space will remain blocked. Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) will be attached with the virtual machine. So if you want you cannot separate the disk from the virtual machine. So let’s move on with VDI. Click next and proceed.
On this step we would select the dynamic allocation because we don’t want to fix the size of the disk; if we do that then whatever we use that disk space or not the space will be blocked. Now click on the next.
On this step we can provide the name of the disk and we have to provide the required space size from the size section. Once it is set then click on create and proceed.
On final step we will see the virtual machine is created and you will get a visual like this on the virtualbox.
Once we have done this work. Then we are good to go for operating system installation.
