Run real "Bios Setup" in virtual machine - virtual-machine

Normally if we want to change Bios Setting, we need to restart the PC and when system boot up we press the hot key (F2 or F10) to go "Bios Setup", then change the setting.
However, I would want to do real Bios Setup from Window Environment...Is it possible to copy the image of Bios (of my computer) to a binary file? then setup a virtual machine to run it and do all the changes? If it is impossible with existing tool (VirtualBox, Qemu,VMWARE)...is it possible to write a special virtualization software to do that?
Thanks

Go to your settings of the virtual machine go to system > motherboard click EFI on
Boot your machine and type in the shell (you need to wait a bit)
"exit" then you will go into the BIOS EFI if you want to quit hard power it off and to turn off the bios for boot again reverse the settings...
(For virtualbox)

Related

How to run a discontinued videogame on a Windows XP virtual machine?

My friend and I have downloaded some discountinued videogames from Old Games Download - Retrogaming and Abandonware (which I warmly recommend to any CD-ROM aficionado!). We managed to run two of them after downloading them, mounting their .ISO file and installing them on a Windows 10 machine. The process was fairly smooth.
We are struggling to run the other two. They’re only compatible with Windows XP, so we created a virtual box with XP as the OS, but still no luck. We can’t get the virtual box to connect to Wi-Fi in any way, even after following several tutorials found online. We have tried mounting the games’s ISOs in the following ways:
Using Virtual Clone Drive
Using WinCDEmu
Using Win XP Virtual CD Control Panel
And we think we have managed to actually mount the ISO and install the programme on the virtual machine, but the game won’t start anyway. When we try to run it, this window opens:
Monsters & Co CDROM initial window, with title, play button, exit button
But when we click ‘play’ nothing happens. We have checked the “Insert Guest Addition CD Image” setting that triggers Autoplay and it seems to be up and running. What can we try next?
VirtualBox access internet by connecting to your real machine (the host machine) as if it was a router of some kind. There is no need to make the virtual machine (guest machine) use your wifi adapter directly to get internet connection, just add a virtual network adapter to your guest machine and VirtualBox takes care of everything else (but make sure you have checked the appropriated options during installation process so drivers are installed in your host machine).
Now, the game not launching is hard to say, as we don't have any message or other info about what is causing the falling. Yet, this is a 3D game and VirtualBox is not good enough to hand this kind of computation.

Can I run one WSL2 virtual machine instance on two system?

I'm new to the WSL2 and wondering if it's possible to run the same WSL2 ubuntu instance on both my desktop and laptop.
Now I am able to use wsl --export and wsl --import method to save and load the system to/from my portable hard drive. But these methods takes a long time.
I notice that wsl --import load a file named ext4.vhdx. Is there a way to load straightly from this file?
Update v2.0:
I was able to get a workaround and it works great.
Thanks to Booting from vhdx here, I was able to load straightly from my vhdx file on my portable hard disk. Windows track down its subsystem with regedit, So we can write our own(p.s: make sure to get BasePath right, it starts with "\\\\?", or you will not be able to access the subsystem' filesystem on your host system.):
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_USERS\【your SID here】\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss\{【UUID here】}]
"State"=dword:00000001
"DistributionName"="distribution name"
"Version"=dword:00000002
"BasePath"="vhdx folder path" 【 e.g. "\\\\?\\E:\\S061\\WSL\\ubuntu-20"】
"Flags"=dword:0000000f
"DefaultUid"=dword:000003e8
I suppose the best way to do this would be to store ext4.vhd on a network storage device accessible to both devices.
I have previosly mentioned how to move ext4.vhd. You can check that out here
Basically you need to export from one machine and import it while making sure the vhd file is configured for wsl to access from the network storage
Since this should *officially* not supported expect some performance hits
Another way would be to run WSL on one computer and ssh/remote desktop to it from another device on the network
I'm of the strong belief that sharing the same ext4 vhd between two VM's simultaneously would be a bad idea. See this and this Unix & Linux StackExchange, including the part about ...
note that sharing LVs/partitions on a single disk between the servers at the same time is NOT very safe. You should only access whole disks from any of the servers at one time.
However, as dopewind's answer mentioned, you can access the WSL instance on one computer (probably the desktop) from another (e.g. the laptop). There are several techniques you can use:
If you have Windows 10 Professional or Enterprise on one of the computers, you can enable Remote Desktop, which allows you to access pretty much everything on one computer from another. RDP ("Remote Desktop Protocol") even works from other devices such as an iPad or Android tablet (or even a phone, although that's a bit of a small screen for a "desktop"). That said, there are better, more idiomatic solutions for WSL ...
You could enable SSH server on the Windows 10 computer with the WSL instance (instructions). This may sound counterintuitive to some people, since Linux itself running in the WSL instance also includes an SSH server (by default). But by SSH'ing from (for example) your laptop into your desktop's Windows 10, you can then launch any WSL instance you have installed (if you choose to install more than one) via wsl -d <distroName>. You also avoid a lot of the network unpleasantness in the next option ...
You could, as mentioned above, enable SSH on the WSL instance (usually something like sudo service ssh start) and then ssh directly into it. However, note that WSL2 instances are NAT'd, so there's a whole lot more hackery that you have to do to get access to the network interface. There's a whole huge thread on the WSL Github about it. Personally, I'd recommend the "Windows SSH Server" option mentioned about to start out with, then you can worry about direct SSH access later if you need it.
Side note: Even though I have SSH enabled on my WSL instances, I still use Windows SSH to proxy to them, to avoid these networking issues.

How to Install a Vagrant Box on a Bare Metal Machine?

Is there an established way to take a Vagrant box and use it as the operating system for a "bare metal" machine, i.e. a normal computer and not a hypervisor, without having to sit through an installation process?
Now I understand the common response will probably be "install an OS regularly and then use a proper configuration management tool like Puppet or Chef" but hear me out. Our IT organization would like to create a base Vagrant box with all security-related protocols and applications enforced. Then a configuration management tool like Puppet could install "useful" applications like databases and web servers on top of it.
This works best when a software developer wants to deploy a new utility to development environments or servers - they can write the Puppet code to install exactly what they want, which can be turned over to IT to run it on top of the validated Vagrant box to create a virtual machine server.
By hosting the Vagrant box internally, we can hide the security details from the developer while they write new Puppet code, they can test their Puppet code on the same environment they will run it on, and it will provision much faster during testing since the box is just downloaded once. Most "production" deployments will stay as Virtual Machines.
In rare circumstances, we may want a real, bare-metal server, not a VM, probably when we get new hardware to run more VMs or if the utility we need is very computationally intensive. It would be nice if the existing Vagrant box could be repurposed so bare-metal and virtual servers were indistinguishable.
EDIT: I found a post on askubuntu (https://askubuntu.com/questions/32499/migrate-from-a-virtual-machine-vm-to-a-physical-system) which seems to do what I want, can anyone verify if such a procedure would work on a Vagrant disk image, if there would be necessary cleanup (like Vagrant ssh keys) or if it could be generalized to non-Ubuntu operating systems (since it uses Live CD)?
A Vagrant box packaged for VirtualBox is essentially a virtual disk with metadata. Most likely it's going to have the VirtualBox tools and drivers installed, which won't do much good on a physical system. Not only that, the drivers for the physical system would need to be installed on the box image.
What you're talking about doing is a good use case for some sort of "ghosting" software that simply copies blocks of data to a physical disk. There's really no advantage to using Vagrant here that I can see.

Edit VMX file with vSphere Client

i'm looking for a correct solution to editing VMX file via vSphere clinet without need to SSH to ESX host or using VI and Nano
could anybody please help me??
#Hwoosuk The best way , those i have to use with Vmware, is to get Winscp http://winscp.net and connect it directly to the esxi IP console after enable SSH in the Vmware Firewall (configure/soft/security profile) , you can browse all the local esxi Disk or VMFS on you SAN/NAS. Edit Whatever you want carefully , your log etc.., your Vmxf (no write or edit permit by vmware if the VM is power on).So this is the best way to go inside the vmware file system for reading the low-level subsystem. Enjoy Winscp for any linux serveur you may use in your life with an micro$ computer you may use for admin your datacenter. In the winscp menu go to options/pref and paste the directory where you have Putty installed.(%PROGRAMFILES%\PuTTY\putty.exe). Retain #mister_potato_head solution to do it safely as vmware imposes it , in most case this is the better thing you have to do. :)
The VMX file is generated by vSphere, it you add a new NIC using GUI the vmx file will get updated to reflect this. With this in mind you can use any method to issue commands to edit VM configuration and therefore the vmx file.
Alternately if you would like to edit the VMX file directly you can use PowerCLI as described here

System restart to windows using objective-c

If a users wants to reboot to windows from OS X, he/she either needs to:
a) Reboot holding down the ALT key and select windows
b) Go to System
settings -> Startup disk -> Select windows -> Reboot
(Given that the user has a bootcamp partition and windows installed).
Since I now and then play some games, and prefer doing that directly in Windows and not using e.g. VMWare Fusion. I would like to develop a smarter and easier way of rebooting. I know how to reboot a machine using Objective-c, but how can I choose the boot partition and reboot to it? Basically how the system restart function works in the system settings (choose partition and reboot).
I don't know if there is a programmatic interface, but you can set the startup disk with the bless command, see "man bless".