Virtualisation – A beginners Guide
So you’ve probably heard of virtualisation – whether it’s from one of Linus’ many X gamers/one pc videos, or maybe just your IT guy at work, but if you aren’t too sure what it is, or how to go about setting up Virtual Machines, or even a dedicated PC for VMs, this video should help you out.
So what is virtualisation? Well, normally you install an operating system, like windows directly onto your PC, so when your PC boots up it boots straight into windows, with no other software in the way – that’s knows as “bare metal” – ie the operating system has direct access to your hardware.
Virtualisation ads at least one more layer there, as it emulates what’s known as the “guest” operating system, the one you are running inside the virtual machine. Now I said “at least one more layer”, because you can run virtual machines in two ways, on top of your existing operating system, with tools like VirtualBox, or you can install what’s known as a “hypervisor”, like ESXI from VMWare, or Xen which is open source, instead of a base operating system, and run all your VMs from there.
Now if you just want to toy around with virtual machines, then software like VirtualBox is a great place to start. It’s super easy to use, quick to setup a VM, and simple to control the VM too. If you want to do all your pirating in a VM and open any suspicious links in there so you can’t have any malware ruin your PC, that’s where I’d head.
If, however, you want to do more with VMs, like, say, run multiple operating systems on a single PC, then a bare metal hypervisor is probably the best shout. I’m using ESXI, which I actually don’t really recommend, since it’s very much made for server hardware, and technically isn’t really free, although it seems like a mild grey area.
Xen is probably where I’d head if I was you, but since I already have ESXi installed and setup, lets give you a tour. I’ve got 2 VMs set up, a FreeNAS VM which handles the two 4TB Seagate IronWolf drives that are in the system in a ZFS mirrored volume, which is shared on my network, and I also have an Ubuntu installation running that I use for web development, testing and as a server for a few bots.
This is really handy for me, and the ability to run both OSes simultaneously means that I get to make much better use of the hardware in the system, especially since it’s always on anyway. The number of VMs you can comfortably run on a single system will depend on what you are doing with the VMs, and what you’ve got in the PC, as some VMs, especially when you are doing stuff like GPU passthrough, require you to assign a set amount of CPU cores and RAM, which can limit what’s left for other VMs.
I won’t go too far into passthrough now, as it’s a rather massive can of worms that people like Wendell from Level1Techs can explain much better than I, but suffice it to say that you can pass whole devices, like graphics cards, network ports, and USB hubs, ‘into’ the VM, so that nothing else can access those devices. This means a VM can make use of hardware acceleration, or even run games, if you passthrough a GPU. This can be a very tricky process though, so probably a bit out of the scope of this video.
That pretty much rounds up the basics of virtualisation, if you have any questions make sure to leave them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them as and when I can!
VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
XENServer: https://xenserver.org/
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Disclaimer:
TechteamGB assumes no liability for damage, misuse or misunderstanding of the information contained in this video. Use this information at your own risk. TechteamGB cannot guarantee any particular result from the information contained in this video, and all information was presented as correct as of filming. TechteamGB accepts no liability for information being proven incorrect after the creation of the video, and all information should be taken as opinion and guidance, not fact. This video was not sponsored by anyone, and TechteamGB does not accept monetary – or non-monetary – benefits to alter opinions or results.
