Friday, January 4, 2019

How to manage multiple VMs - Part 1: Guest OS Setup

In order to get the best experiene from the guest OS (VM), you have to install VirtualBox Guest Additions software package.

For example Seamless Mode and Auto-seize Guest Display is not available.


In addition other features that seem available, such as the bidirectional clipboard, drag and drop or Shared Folder with the Host even they seem available, we cannot use them until the tool is installed. 



Go to Device and select Insert Guest Additions CD Image and a Virtual Optical Disk will be mounted to our guest OS. This disk included the 







We will keep the default settings, and since we don't use 3D applications, we will leave the Direct3D support disabled. 




A reboot is required for the changes to take effect.


Now we have the option to drag and drop files from the host to the guest OS. Since our host OS, is the main source of information, where we keep our applications, our notes etc, this is very useful to simply copy paste or drag and drop that info to the guest OS. Copy paste is extremely useful to avoid typos on long Powershell commands for example. 

My suggestion is to use a centralized folder or partition, where we store all our files and folder for our LAB setups, for example Application, OS Disks, unattended files etc. Then we can map those files or whole physical disks to all our guest clients. 

On the host OS, we have a Folder under Virtual Machines parent folder


We can go to the VM Settings, and then to the Shared Folders TAB. 


We will specify the Main Folder path. A name is auto-generated but we can select our own. We can mount this disk as read only if we don't want the guest OS to be able to change things. The easiest way is to auto-mount to the guest OS. We will also specify a mount option (Network Drive Letter)


We can review the settings


We can see that the guest OS, has a mounted Disk V: that has the guest OS Folder mounted. 







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