EEC Logo

Setup Guide for Virtual Systems -- Linux System Administration

The companion guide discusses installing Linux with the goal of testing hardware driver compatibility and such. This is unnecessary when running Linux inside a virtual machine as the virtual hardware can use generic drivers within the guest operating system. Therefore this guide discusses the minimum requirements for training courses which will be using some type of virtualization software.

Terminology

  1. Virtualization
    This is the ability to run multiple operating systems at once. One of these operating systems is in charge of the physical hardware (CPU, RAM, disk space, network cards, and so on). The other operating system is running inside a imaginary box made of one-way glass -- the outside operating system can see into the box, but the operating system inside the box cannot see out. Such compartmentalizing has huge advantages from an operations and support standpoint, not the least of which is the ability to move the glass box from one physical machine to another without any impact on the operating system running inside the box!

  2. Host operating system
    This is the operating system on the outside of the ``glass box'' referred to in the previous paragraph. This operating system has full control of the hardware -- it decides how much CPU time is given to the other operating system, how much RAM, whether the other operating system has any (virtual) disk drives or optical media, and so on; all physical resources are rationed by the host operating system (or just host system).

    In addition the host system can create virtual devices when physical hardware doesn't even exist. For example, a 1.44MB file on the host system can appear to be a floppy device inside the glass box. Ejecting the ``floppy'' means disconnecting the host's file from the glass box, making it look like the floppy disk has been removed.

  3. Guest operating system
    This is the operating system running inside the glass box. Because it executes entirely within the glass box, it cannot see anything of the environment in which it runs. It's possible that the disk drives it thinks it has are just ordinary disk files on the host system. It's possible that the network card it thinks it has is used to communicate with the host system but isn't actually hooked up to a real network. It is often shortened to guest system.

  4. CDROM image
    It's common to create a CDROM image of an operating system's installation media for use during installation of a guest operating system. Essentially this means a byte-for-byte copy of what is on the CDROM is written to a file on the host system, then that file becomes a ``virtual CDROM'' in the guest system.

  5. Virtual Machine
    This is all of the above combined into a single, cohesive unit. A host system with virtualization software installed, in which the CDROM image was connected to the glass box and used to install the guest system.

Minimum Host Requirements

This section describes the hardware and software requirements for the host system.

The above specifications should be considered the minimum; bigger or faster is always better! In particular, virtualization software will benefit greatly from (1) additional RAM and (2) a faster CPU, in that order.

Virtualization Software

Any software chosen by your organization. Please notify us of your choice so that the courseware can be customized appropriately, if necessary.

Example choices include VMware (the VMPlayer software is sufficient), VirtualBox, VirtualPC, Parallels, and others.

Testing Your Setup

For all classes other than Linux System Administration 1, the students will expect to have a Linux server they can log into in the first hands-on workshop on the first day of class. Therefore, site personnel should install a virtual machine and test it on the students' machines to ensure that the virtualization software was installed properly.

The easiest solution is typically to download an existing virtual machine from the Internet. Contact our office if you would like suggestions on where to find such a download.

Even for the Linux System Administration 1 course, such a virtual machine can simplify things on your end: the first student lab is to install the guest operating system, so having a pre-built virtual machine that is known to work -- and that the students can overwrite with their installation -- simplifies the testing work.

In either case, here are the requirements for the virtual machine environment that will suffice for all of the courses in our Linux curriculum:

External Resources

The above list makes reference to ``CDROM images'' and says that operating systems are often distributed on optical media. For the purposes of installing Linux (only required for the Linux System Administration 1 course) it can be convenient to have instructions on where to find such downloads. Given below is information on where to find some common distributions:

  1. RedHat Linux
    This consists of RedHat Enterprise Linux and RedHat Enterprise Desktop Linux.
  2. SUSE Linux
    This consists of SUSE Enterprise Linux and SUSE Enterprise Desktop.
  3. Ubuntu Linux
    This consists of a Debian kernel and packaging/desktop utilities from Ubuntu. It's primary claim to fame are the user-friendly tools which will offer to download and install proprietary drivers for the user based on the hardware found.

Notes

This page may contain product names which are trademarked and the lack of specific recognition does not constitute a challenge to said trademark status.

[ Last updated: Thu Nov 12 18:23:51 EST 2009 ]