Because of VMware tools I can copy a string from guest OS to host OS and vice a versa. I want to know how this functionality works ? what VMware performs so that clipboard is shared between two different OS.
Yesterday, I learnt about VARIANT struct in Microsoft COM. VARIANT is like a middle ware on which some engine will run and allow data of one type accessible in other format of some other language.[please correct me if this is wrong or I am not talking right]
So just want to ask, is something like this works in virtual machines ? Because this functionality is so so helpful that I want understand this concept.
I have not tried in virtual box yet but if it supports same functionality then how do they work ? I would like to read about it if any links found.
Since your virtual machine still runs on the true hardware of your host machine it although uses its peripheral devices and hardware.
So vmware or virtual machines in general has to "root" this device to your virtual OS.
So what Vmware (especially VMWARE Tools) does is when you have copied something into your clipboard, to synchronize this data with the second clipboard. So it provides interfaces between your host data like clipboard or date an time and sets it in your virtual OS.
Have a look here:
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/sharing-clipboard-vmware-35825.html
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/new_guest_tools_ws.html.
This does not exactly answers your question, but should give some ideas on further research.
Related
I am using VmWare Workstation 14 and when I install an operating system (any of them) some programs and apps are able to identify that I am using a virtual machine.
I have seen the vm is using virtualized devices that are really named virtual. like for example VmWare Network Card or etc. Is there any way to install fake real like hardware drivers on these virtual machines? Can this simple change make the app see this vm as a real machine?
How to make this virtual machine appear as a real machine to applications?
Is there really any way?
This was asked as a yes-or-no question so my answer is:
Yes... probably. But it's a lot of work.
There's a 2006 presentation by Tom Liston and Ed Skoudis that talks about this: https://handlers.sans.org/tliston/ThwartingVMDetection_Liston_Skoudis.pdf
It focuses on VMware, but some of it would also apply to other types of Virtual Machine Environments (VMEs).
In summary, they identify as many things as they can find that would allow VM detection, which would each have to be addressed, and they also mention some VMware-specific mitigations for them.
VME artifacts in processes, file system, and/or Windows registry. These would include the VMtools service and "over 50 different references in the file system to 'VMware' and vmx" and "over 300 references in the Registry to 'VMware'", all of which would have to be deleted or changed.
VME artifacts in memory. Specific regions of memory tend to be different in guests (VMs) than hosts, namely the Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT), Global
Descriptor Table (GDT), and Local Descriptor Table (LDT). The method by which the VM is built may allow these to appear the same in guests as they do in hosts.
VME-specific virtual hardware. This would include the drivers you mention like VmWare Network Card. The drivers would have to be removed or replaced with drivers that do not match the names or code signatures of any virtual drivers. Probably easiest to do on an open-source system, simply by modifying the driver source code and build.
VME-specific processor instructions and capabilities. Some VMEs add non-standard machine language instructions, or modify the behaviour of existing instructions. These can be changed or removed by editing the VME source code, at the cost of convenient host-guest interaction.
VME differences in behaviour. A VM might respond differently on the network, or fail at time synchonization. This could be mitigated with additional source code changes (on both host and guest) to make the network traffic look closer to normal, and providing sufficient CPU cores to the VM would help make sure it does not run more slowly than wall clock time.
Again this is from 2006, so if anyone has a more up-to-date reference, I'd love to see their answer.
sorry for bad English. I have a virtual machine and there i installed a software that make some events.
But this events only happens on virtual machine.
Exist any possibility to this events works in my main machine? I mean, an integration between virtual machine and main machine, so when for example my software on virtual machine press "A" keyboard key, on MAIN machine also will happen a "A" press keyboard key?
Thanks
Depending on what you are using VMware, VirtualBox, etc , you will need to install the appropriate software on the guest, so you can enable features like, bi-directional copy paste etc.
Once you have this set up you can look up in internet the exact configuration for your hypervisor.
For example here is a working solution for VirtualBox.
VMWare have notoriously bad documentation, also I couldn't find similar feature for the VMPlayer or the workstation. Here is a link to get you started
Hope the links are helpful .
I've seen programs like magicdisc create virtual cd drives and mount them on the machine. How do these programs trick the operating system into thinking there is a new hardware device attached to it?
I imagine I would have to write a driver for the virtual hardware, and I am comfortable in C so that doesn't sound terrible, but how do I make the OS think there is a piece of hardware attached to it that isn't?
Thanks!
Usually the operating system has different layers and libraries, at some point there is a library that sits between something above it and the actual hardware, you fake it there, if there is some sort of read sector call, you pretend to read a sector using that sector address, read it from a file, whatever. Each operating system (windows, linux, etc) may do things a different way.
Probably you are familiar with C as application level, which is above OS.
The virtual driver is a piece a software, but need to write in proper locations the settings: Registry at Windows, some config file at some Linux. You need to handle OS level calls and callbacks at Kernel level. Than you will desire the software too to communicate with your device, probably integrated into OS Shell. At least 2 layes will be , if not 3 or more.
For eg windows xp you can make a virtual graphic card(and intercept various things), for Vista not, just with a trick :)
It is very-very OS specific.
The joys of multimonitor programming are countless, I think there are about 5 blog posts on Coding Horror on the topic alone!
I often code in Windows on my main machine, and have my Mac laptop set up to the side. I use the Mac both to compile Mac builds but also as my "reference web browser". There's no KVM or anything.
However a casual conversation at a conference led me to the question, could I use two independent machines to share windows? Literally move some windows from one machine to another, so I could use one PC's display as "overflow" from the other.
Some googling suddenly shows that this is possible in some situations for sure:
Synergy and Maxivista
My question is whether any programmers have tried such a setup. We have unique needs especially with multiple text windows and editors, and this kind of tool may be a huge win or a huge hassle.
This solution feels like a combination of easy KVM switching AND multiple monitors.. it sounds like a programming dream! So advice or especially reports of actual experience in a programming environment would be greatly useful before I invest in the rather complex setup.
Followup:
Sounds like I'm asking for something that doesn't exist! It's kind of combination of a software KVM and VNC. But the VNC would need to break out the app windows and allow individual manipulation (like that maxivista commercial tool, which is Vista only).
Thanks for all the feedback. Looks like there's demand for a cool app if anyone has the drive to be first in this new nich!
Synergy doesn't allow you to move windows between machines (that would require a silly amount of work behind the scenes), but it does allow you to share a keyboard and mouse between two machines so they "appear" to be all one machine, but actually run separately.
I personally use Input Director, as I found it more stable than Synergy. I have my laptop with an external monitor to the right, and my desktop to the left as an Input Director slave. My desktop runs a different O/S and is basically my guinea pig box for testing stuff and for anything I need to keep running when I leave the office. Cut + paste is pretty seamless, so I can quite happily fire up an RDP session to a server on my desktop, and cut+paste SQL scripts from that to my laptop.
It's a very useful thing to have if you have a few physical boxes and monitors kicking around :)
I've actually managed to use spare notebook as a second monitor to Desktop PC. This allows to move windows to second PC, but not vise-versa.
Solution would work basically with any OS.
The only requirement is a spare VGA (or DVI-I/DVI-A) port on server PC.
Make a dummy VGA plug http://www.overclock.net/t/384733/the-30-second-dummy-plug
This will also work for DVI-I/DVI-A port + DVI-VGA adapter
Detect virtual monitor with your OS. Monitor will be detected as very generic monitor, so you can set up any resolution. Set it to slave PC resolution.
Use any remote control software to connect from slave to server PC. Set it to display only "virtual" monitor.
That's all. Your slave PC is a second monitor for server PC.
I've used this on Windows 7 + TeamViewer. I've additionally set up Mouse Without Borders (Microsoft Synergy analog) to be able to use slave PC with same mouse&keyboard, though this is not required if you intend to transform it to monitor-only.
Xdmx - Distributed Multihead X Project (linux only)
Provides native X display on external machines, no VNC cons.
The following is not exactly what you want, but pretty close:
You can start a VNC server on the Windows machine, which will let you "export" its graphical screen.
Then, unplug the monitor from the Windows machine and use it as external laptop monitor instead, with your Mac laptop.
There, on your Mac, you just connect to the VNC session using Chicken of the VNC, which will give you the graphical screen content of the Windows machine as a Mac window (interactively, so you can actually control the windows machine as if you were working on it directly). You can put that on the external monitor, and you can also put other windows there, so you really have a shared environment.
I believe this solution also lets you copy and paste content from the Windows screen to Mac windows and vice versa.
I use MaxiVista on WinXP while programming. It works fantastically and lets me add a third screen to my multi-monitor configuration.
There is hope, here for windows users: http://virtualmonitor.github.io/ Looks like a work-in-progress and only supports windows 2000 - windows 7, but he's looking for help with windows 7 - 8.
Unfortunately, synergy doesn't allow moving windows across screens currently. It only forwards mouse&keyboard events from one set of physical devices to different computers.
Yes, and I love it. It allows you get past 2 screens on a laptop, and really I find 3 a great amount.
If your main machine is a Mac you want ScreenRecycler. You can then use monitors on other Mac, Windows, and Linux machines (anything with a VNC client). You will want something better than the Mac's crappy windows management though. I suggest Many Tricks' Moom and Witch.
On Windows, as #LachlanG said, MaxiVista works great. And it supports adding monitors from Windows, Mac, and Linux machines.
I am reusing my old laptop as a second monitor to see the live preview while coding. I am using SpaceDesk, which is free.
I use barrier and open source fork of synergy. Its a little hard to use but works really well. (To find it just search google for 'barrier github').
When testing our software on several different systems (98-XP-Vista-Seven-Linux-etc), I think that the best choice is to use virtualized systems.
What's your choice: VMware, Virtual Box or MS Virtual PC/Server? and why?
We use VMWare here at work. Really any VM software that supports snapshots (or some way of saving the state of the machine) will work well. Snapshots make it easier for testing installs and rolling back. It can also help if you program goes and modifies files for returning back to a known-good state.
Virtual Box is the way to go. It has snapshots and is platform independent (Good for Mac users who want to test on other OS's). And it is free.
If it's available, Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 is a powerful and full-featured entry including snapshot trees and all the niceties you'd expect with a quality UI.
If you're planning on using the VM on your local dev machine so you can (e.g.) bring it home on your laptop to work from there, then the more client-oriented virtualization software is probably the way to go.
If you're planning on using the virtualization in a primarily professional environment, a number of Hyper V machines in a computer lab that you can remote into is a powerful paradigm that we've been using at my office for a few months now.
My own preference is to use a local VM (Virtual PC is the easiest one for me) as my development environment because I can bring my work laptop home and use the VM there also (I don't VPN into the office). I then use the lab's Hyper-V machines for tests, deployments, etc because they have a better story for taking and restoring snapshots.
Go VMware. My reason is simple: before VMware released VMWare player and VMware server (the virtualisation platform formerly known as VMware GSX), the market for VM hosts was limited and expensive.
When VMware released these for free, all the other manufacturers (yes, I'm looking at Microsoft here) had to follow suit, so if it wasn't for the beneficence of VMware, we'd still be looking at having to buy our VM host software.
So, support VMware for being the good guys.
Oh, and their enterprise products are the business, they work well with Linux, have some excellent memory-saving tricks (here's the tech details), multiple snapshots and snapshots off a base image, and have features such as VMotion (load spreading) that other products don't support nearly as well (if at all).
Microsoft's VirtualPC. It free and simple.
One bit of functionality that is nice is the differenced VHDD that makes it easy (and space wise cheep) to keep backing up/reverting the image
VMWare, that's what we use here. We have both the full blown ESX for virtual servers and the VMWare workstations for development / testing. ESX resource management is very good, and easy to configure.
I've used VMWare (when the company would pay for it), VMWare Server (when the company would not), VirtualBox (because it's free, decent, and supports snapshots), Parallels on the Mac (which I bought), and Xen.
All work fine.
My current workhorse is VirtualBox, largely because it's free, supports snapshots, and runs on the various host platforms I have to use.
VMWare works pretty well, but for high cpu server apps we have found that Microsoft's Hyper-V works better because it has better cpu reservation abilities.
The key is that the system has snapshots, so you can easily roll back to several states (most do) and we have found that both VMWare and Hyper-V have excellent API's allowing us to kick off our automated tests when a new build completes.
Microsoft Virtual PC for Microsoft OS's, Virtual Box for *nix.
Virtual PC seem to be slightly faster and more stable, but it does not support linux.
We might have used VMWare if it was free,but our company would not spend the money.
Virtual box is great. It does have some stability issues if you run it inside Mac OS X. if you need a single solution to run multiple OS's this would be the one.
Linux/OpenSolaris on top of Virtual Box on top of Linux.