Posted by Vince on 4/21/2009, 4:49 pm, in reply to "More on VirtualBox"
68.144.14.16
There are a number of neat tricks one can employ (or deploy -whatever), when doing virtual machine installs.
VMware workstation itself is relatively expensive but VMware Player is free. The major difference between the two is that the workstation is used for BUILDING virtual machine images and -additionally- has "vmware tools" included with it. VMware PLAYER though, will mount any pre-made image and run it just fine as long as the tools were installed to the image it's playing. (VMware tools are like 32 bit graphics drivers, mouse handling, network configurations and so on).
It's quite possible to build images with VMware Player too, though. As long as one has the basic "shell" to create the hooks into the host operating system ........ and can get the vmware tools from somewhere ....... the player can create just as good images as the work station.
So, like ......... you get someone to create you the shell with THEIR work station and send it to you by email. This is doable since the shell is relatively small in size. (You can alse get free scripts for this on the internet is you're enterprising enough to work with scripts). Additionally, you need to get the VMware tools from somewhere as well. (An image runs pretty awful without the tools installed).
Here's "the" neat thing now ......
With the basic shell, you start the shell with a VMware player and have your installation disc inserted and ready. You can do the full install of a guest OS into the player itself! After it's finished, you need to install the tools into the guest OS. The tools install like any other program into the guest. IOW they DON'T install to the player but rather, install to the guest OS. You can actually uninstall them in Add/Remove of the guest OS.
One of the "vagaries" of VMware is that the virtual hard drive never quits growing (unless you specify a size limit before creating the machine). Even when you DO specify a limit, the drive starts out quite small and/but quickly "fills" the allotted space. Since VM's are stored as files in a folder (instead of, as drive partitions), you like to keep those file sizes DOWN ...... so you can run LOTS of different VM's . Well ....... so maybe you have a 10gb drive size allotted to a VM but it only OCCUPIES a real 4 gb. The rest of the allotment is unused space. It's very annoying to have a near 10gb file sitting there in a folder when only 4 gb of that is useful data and 6 gb is wasted space.
What to do about that? Believe it or not, this is a very persistent and difficult problem to resolve. Since the data in a system keeps being written/deleted/fragments etc. and since the virtual drive HAS to behave like a real drive, it feels perfectly entitled to write all over the entire allotted space and thereby "gobble it up" without reservation. I've read many complaints and queries from IT guys whose guest machines have grown to over 100gb in size! They don't want to ditch them because they've developed them so heavily already but the size is starting to strangle their hard drives.
Well, there's a relatively simple way to fix it.
First, you defrag the virtual machine so that all of the active files are clustered near the beginning of the virtual drive.
Next, you install an imaging program like Acronis True Image ........ into the guest machine. Then you make an image of the guest OS and transport it outside of the VM to a file somewhere in the host machine's hard drive, using the network. (Network is the tunnel to the real world hard drive).
You shut down that guest machine and create a new shell (or use a copied one). The shell itself is only about a megabyte in size, or so -very tiny, relatively speaking. You put the Acronis rescue CD into the CDROM ....... fire up the shell ......... and RESTORE the saved Acronis image INTO the shell! Presto! The new virtual machine will be only as big as the files inside of it!
By using an imaging program, you can actually CONVERT an existing real OS into a VM OS ... using the same procedure. First you image the real OS .......... then you load the shell ........... then you restore that image into the shell ...... and away you go!
-Vince
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