Virtual Machine for running Red Hat on Windows Vista - virtual-machine

It looks like there are a variety of virtual machine offerings available. What is the best one to use with Vista as the host operating system and Red Hat Linux as the guest?

Another option would be Virtualbox.

Check out VMWare Server... it's free and it's great. Also, this question would be better asked at ServerFault.com

Related

Is it possible to run SikuliX on a host computer and have the script interact with virtual machine?

Currently running Windows 10 (native) and VMware Workstation 12 Player. I am running various LTS releases of Ubuntu in VMware.
I am wondering if there is way for me to run SikuliX on my main OS, Windows 10, and have the script interact with a virtual machine, running an Ubuntu OS, that I have open.
The quickstart documentation on the download site isn't very specific about the limitations of SikuliX on this topic. It simply says that you can't run it on a headless system (which VMware is not), and you need to have a monitor - the only problem is that I have no idea if SikuliX considers VMware to be a legitimate monitor or not.
I am aware of the fact that you can install Sikulix on the virtual machine itself, but this is not preferable as I would have to possibly reconfigure my VM settings to allocate more memory OR just deal with running the script at a slower pace.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The answer is yes, if you run SikuliX on a native host, it is possible to interact with the the interface of the virtual machine the same as running SikuliX on the virtual machine itself.
Now that I think about it, I should have probably tested this out before posting the question, but hey, if anyone has the same question as I do, now you know.

Virtual machine to use Linux

I am using Windows 8, and I need to install Linux. I have searched a lot, but I still cannot decide which virtual machine is the best for Linux. I am thinking between VMware and VirtualBox. Could anyone advise me which virtual machine I can use for installing Linux and for free, or give me any helpful links?
Thank you!
As you mentioned, you could use VMWare Workstation or VirtualBox. However, VMWare workstation is not free. You could have an option of using VMWare Player, but you'd have to start elsewhere and I would not recommend that. Here's a pretty good article comparing them:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/virtualization/review-vmware-workstation-9-vs-virtualbox-42-203277
Additionally, if you have 64-bit Windows 8 Professional or Enterprise and recent hardware, you can just use Hyper-V, which works quite well and will cost you nothing. Here's an article that will help you get it installed:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/get-started-with-windows-8-client-hyper-v-the-right-way/
As far as recommendations, if you truly want free, you are looking at either Hyper-V or Virtual Box. If you use Hyper-V, that is Microsoft specific and works quite well -- on windows machines only. If you want to end up with a virtual machine that you could use over on different systems/platforms, I would use Virtual Box.
If you are willing to spend the money, I'd most recommend VMWare Workstation. It is cross-platform and works really well and generally has more features, plus it will have better performance that Virtual Box, which you can expect to be the slowest of the bunch.

One click virtual machine demo?

I want to give a demo for my customers use virtual machine, but I don't want the customer to install the virtual machine software, can I make a demo which bundle the virtual machine software and my virtual machine, then just a click to run the virtual machine. It will be cool. is there any tool can do that?
I'm not aware of a virtual machine that doesn't need to be installed. If using Windows, the Microsoft Virtual PC is a relatively compact, free, quick-to-install option for a VM.
One other option would be to install an OS and your demo onto a USB flash drive. As long as the computer used can boot from USB (which is pretty common in newer computers), then you can have complete control over the OS in this fashion.
EDIT: Sun VirtualBox is free VM software. You do have to install it, but I've found that it works well, plus it's free.
You could try using Portable VirtualBox as per this forum thread. I have not tried it myself but it seems like some people have had luck with it.

What's your choice for testing your program in a virtual machine?

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.

How do you enable the network on a virtual machine running Vista x64?

I'm running Server 2008 64bit with Hyper-V. I've created a virtual machine with Vista 64bit and installed it. I can't get the Vista virtual machine to see the network adapter.
I've set-up an external network on the Virtual Network Manager (Hyper-V) and associated that with the virtual machine (Vista). I've also tried using a Legacy Network Adapter but that didn't work either although that time the Vista machine saw the network card but couldn't connect through it.
This is (obviously) the first time I've tried to set-up a virtual machine.
Any ideas?
EDIT: I notice that this question has been voted down a couple of times. I know that it's not a programming question but I'm a developer setting up a virtual machine to test my C#/ASP.NET code on and thought that other developers may hit this problem as well when they're doing this...
I don't know Hyper-V, but I know in VMWare you can create a network connection in Bridged mode (meaning the VM will get it's own IP address via DHCP if that's enabled) or host-only mode (meaning the VM can only communicate with the host). When Vista could see the card, could it communicate with the host machine (which would indicate a host-only connection was specified)? What kind of IP address did it have (I would guess Hyper-V has a built-in DHCP server like VMWare does?) -- that might give additional clues.
Sorry I don't know Hyper-V better...
Make sure you have the Hyper-V Tools installed on the Guest VM. You shouldn't need the legacy adapter.
You also may want to make sure you have all of the latest updates which may have addressed your issue. Particularly, KB950050
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950050
It turns out that Vista x64 running as a VM through Hyper-V doesn't support the virtual network connection/card and that you have to set it up as a legacy network card. When I eventually got the config settings correct for the legacy network and disable the virtual network it connected.
Thanks for the help guys - much appreciated!