Savannah W-ITS

VirtualBox Security Tools – testing or installing Live CD images as virtual machines
I noted that this seems to be a popular approach for VMWare images and decided to try a few tools out using VirtualBox.   As with any such ’security solution’ you should carefully evaluate the tools that you allow (or the OS builds that you [...]

CMS=Content Management System
Rails = Ruby on Rails – a development framework using the Ruby language, Active Record, and Restful programming.
VDI – virtual disk image (Sun Virtualbox virtual machine solution)
Zena is described as a state of the art CMS “with a focus on usability, ease of customization and web 2.0 goodness (application like behaviour).”  There are [...]

NOTE – I am a disruptive user – I typically explore new(er) technology offerings in a manner that vendors might not prefer so please note that your mileage should vary, especially if you are a non-disruptive user…

Xen?  I thought that Xen = Citrix?

Yes and no…   The Citrix product line includes technologies developed/derived from the Xen Open Source project. 

Start by creating your virtual machine image (including installing your OS of choice) – in my example this is Source.VDI.

Duplicating a virtual machine (VM) image with Virtualbox is simple but requires using the command line:

VBoxManage clonevdi  Source.VDI  New_clone.VDI

The time required to clone a VirtualBox image (VDI) is  dependant upon the size of the your VDI image and the processing power of your computer system.  The cloning process  creates

Since the VMware install under Fedora 9 was problematic and since there are other kernel related problems (random seg-faults with Fedora 9) I decided to try VMware under Fedora 8 (2.6.26.5-28.fc8.) The now familiar install process went smoothly. In less than 10 minutes the install was completed, and the VMs created under Vista were installed and ready for use.

It should be noted that VMware Server 2.0 does NOT explicitly list Fedora as a supported OS for VMware Server 2.0; while the install seemed to be ‘normal’, I could not get all of the required processes to run and I could not logon to the web console. I also could not locate any error messages pointing me to a solution.

After flipping between Vista (64 bit) and Fedora 8/9 I find that:

• Virtual Box under Vista integrates well but performance is somewhat less robust than when running similar VMs under Linux;  but hardware issues (specifically USB device sharing) seem to work well under Vista.
• Creating an NTFS native partition (or two) is quite useful if there is a need to share data across OS instances or when running under different primary hosts