OVM_Setup

Summary feature of OVM
·         Multiple operating systems on one desktop
·         Cross-platform guests and hosts including Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris, and Mac OS X as a host
·         Teleportation of running virtual machines between hosts without interruption
·         High performance
·         Support for massive workloads of up to 32 virtual CPUs
·         OVF format support

Why we use Oracle VM Virtual-Box?

The techniques and features that Virtual-Box provides are useful for several scenarios:

 Running multiple operating systems simultaneously.
Virtual-Box allows you to run more than one operating system at a time. This way, you can run software written for one operating system on another (for example, Windows software on Linux or a Mac) without having to reboot to use it. Since you can configure what kinds of “virtual” hardware should be presented to each such operating system, you can install an old operating system such as DOS or OS/2 even if your real computer’s hardware is no longer supported by that operating system.

Easier software installations.
 Software vendors can use virtual machines to ship entire software configurations. For example, installing a complete mail server solution on a real machine can be a tedious task. With Virtual-Box, such a complex setup (then often called an “appliance”) can be packed into a virtual machine. Installing and running a mail server becomes as easy as importing such an appliance into Virtual-Box.

Testing and disaster recovery.
Once installed, a virtual machine and its virtual hard disks can be considered a “container” that can be arbitrarily frozen, woken up, copied, backed up, and transported between hosts. On top of that, with the use of another Virtual-Box feature called “snapshots”, one can save a particular state of a virtual machine and revert back to that state, if necessary. This way, one can freely experiment with a computing environment. If something goes wrong (e.g. after installing misbehaving software or infecting the guest with a virus), one can easily switch back to a previous snapshot and avoid the need of frequent backups and restores. Any number of snapshots can be created, allowing you to travel back and forward in virtual machine time. You can delete snapshots while a VM is running to reclaim disk space.
  
Infrastructure consolidation.
 Virtualization can significantly reduce hardware and electricity costs. Most of the time, computers today only use a fraction of their potential power and run with low average system loads. A lot of hardware resources as well as electricity are thereby wasted. So, instead of running many such physical computers that are only partially used, one can pack many virtual machines onto a few powerful hosts and balance the loads between them.

Virtual machine (VM).
This is the special environment that Virtual-Box creates for your guest operating system while it is running. In other words, you run your guest operating system “in” a VM. Normally, a VM will be shown as a window on your computers desktop, but depending on which of the various frontends of Virtual-Box you use, it can be displayed in full screen mode or remotely on another computer.
In a more abstract way, internally, Virtual-Box thinks of a VM as a set of parameters that determine its behavior. They include hardware settings (how much memory the VM should have, what hard disks Virtual-Box should virtualize through which container files, what CDs are mounted etc.) as well as state information (whether the VM is currently running, saved, its snapshots etc.).

Hardware support

Virtual-Box Hardware supports:

Guest multiprocessing (SMP).
 Virtual-Box can present up to 32 virtual CPUs to each virtual machine, irrespective of how many CPU cores are physically present on your host.

USB device support.
Virtual-Box implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device-specific drivers on the host. USB support is not limited to certain device categories.

Hardware compatibility.
Virtual-Box virtualizes a vast array of virtual devices, among them many devices that are typically provided by other virtualization platforms. That includes IDE, SCSI and SATA hard disk controllers, several virtual network cards and sound cards, virtual serial and parallel ports and an Input/Output Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (I/O APIC), which is found in many modern PC systems.
This eases cloning of PC images from real machines and importing of third-party virtual machines into Virtual-Box.

Full ACPI support.
The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is fully supported by Virtual-Box. This eases cloning of PC images from real machines or third party virtual machines into Virtual-Box. With its unique

ACPI power status support,
Virtual-Box can even report to ACPI-aware guest operating systems the power status of the host. For mobile systems running on battery, the guest can thus enable energy saving and notify the user of the remaining power (e.g. in full screen modes).

Multiscreen resolutions.
Virtual-Box virtual machines support screen resolutions many times that of a physical screen, allowing them to be spread over a large number of screens attached to the host system.
  
Built-in iSCSI support.
This unique feature allows you to connect a virtual machine directly to an iSCSI storage server without going through the host system. The VM accesses the iSCSI target directly without the extra overhead that is required for virtualizing hard disks in container files

PXE Network boot.
The integrated virtual network cards of Virtual-Box fully support remote booting via the Pre-boot Execution Environment (PXE).

Multigenerational branched snapshots.
Virtual-Box can save arbitrary snapshots of the state of the virtual machine. You can go back in time and revert the virtual machine to any such snapshot and start an alternative VM configuration from there, effectively creating a whole snapshot tree

VM groups.
Virtual-Box provides a groups feature that enables the user to organize virtual machines collectively, as well as individually. In addition to basic groups, it is also possible for any VM to be in more than one group, and for groups to be nested in a hierarchy – i.e. groups of groups. In general, the operations that can be performed on groups are the same as those that can be applied to individual VMs i.e. Start, Pause, Reset, Close (Save state, Send Shutdown, Power-off), Discard Saved State, Show in file System, Sort.

Clean architecture; unprecedented modularity.
Virtual-Box has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a clean separation of client and server code. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a VM simply by clicking on a button in the Virtual-Box graphical user interface and then control that machine from the command line, or even remotely.
Due to its modular architecture, Virtual-Box can also expose its full functionality and configurability through a comprehensive software development kit (SDK), which allows for integrating every aspect of Virtual-Box with other software systems.

 Remote machine display.
The Virtual-Box Remote Desktop Extension (VRDE) allows for high-performance remote access to any running virtual machine. This extension supports the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) originally built into Microsoft Windows, with special additions for full client USB support.
The VRDE does not rely on the RDP server that is built into Microsoft Windows; instead, it is plugged directly into the virtualization layer. As a result, it works with guest operating systems other than Windows (even in text mode) and does not require application support in the virtual machine either.

On top of this special capacity, Virtual-Box offers you more unique features:

Extensible RDP authentication.
Virtual-Box already supports Win logon on Windows and PAM on Linux for RDP authentication. In addition, it includes an easy-to-use SDK which allows you to create arbitrary interfaces for other methods of authentication.

 USB over RDP. Via RDP virtual channel support, Virtual-Box also allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices locally to a virtual machine which is running remotely on a Virtual-Box RDP server.

Supported host operating systems

Currently, Virtual-Box runs on the following host operating systems:

Windows hosts:
Windows XP, all service packs (32-bit)
Windows Server 2003 (32-bit)
Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit1).
Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows 8 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)
_

Mac OS X hosts:2
10.6 (Snow Leopard, 32-bit and 64-bit)
10.7 (Lion, 32-bit and 64-bit)
10.8 (Mountain Lion, 64-bit)
10.9 (Mavericks, 64-bit)

Linux hosts (32-bit and 64-bit3). Among others, this includes:
10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”), 10.10 (“Maverick Meerkat), 11.04 (“Natty Narwhal”), 11.10
(“Oneiric Oncelot”), 12.04 (“Precise Pangolin”), 12.10 (“Quantal Quetzal”), 13.04
(“Raring Ringtail”), 13.10 (“Saucy Salamander”)
Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (“squeeze”) and 7.0 (“wheezy”)
Oracle Enterprise Linux 5, Oracle Linux 6
Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6
Fedora Core 6 to 19
Gentoo Linux
openSUSE 11.0, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 12.1, 12.2
Mandriva 2010 and 2011

Solaris hosts (64-bit only) are supported with the restrictions listed.

Solaris 11 including Solaris 11 Express
Solaris 10 (u8 and higher)


Installation Steps:-
Use downloads URL Oracle Virtual-Box Software (VirtualBox-4.3.26-Win64).


Install Dependency Packages for VirtualBox

VirtualBox uses vboxdrv kernel module to control and allocate physical memory for execution of guest operating systems. Without this module, you can still use the VirtualBox to create and configure virtual machines, but they will not work. So, to make VirtualBox fully functional you will need to update your system first, then install some additional modules like DKMSkernel-headers and kernel-devel and some dependency packages.
#vboxdrv
#DKMS
#kernel-headers
#kernel-devel 
# yum update
# yum install binutils qt gcc make patch libgomp glibc-headers glibc-devel kernel-headers kernel-devel dkms
# yum install gcc make patch  dkms qt libgomp 
# yum install kernel-headers kernel-devel fontforge binutils glibc-headers glibc-devel

# Install OVM rpm

Creating a Virtual Machine ( For Guest OS)

Open Application -> System Tools -> VirtualBox ( Command name is “virtualbox” )
Click Machine -> New. This will launch a “Create New Virtual Machine” wizard. Click Next.
Enter the name of the Guest machine as you desire and choose the Operating system and Version that you are planning to install as follows, and click “Next”.



Enter the RAM size that you want to provide to your Guest machine as follows.


Now it will ask you to choose your “Virtual Hard Disk” for installing the guest OS as follows.


Since this is the first time we are installing, click “Create New Hard disk”.
Create “New Virtual Disk” wizard will open. Click Next
Now we need to choose, whether the disk has to be “Dynamically expanding disk” or “Fixed-size storage”.
Remember, for a guest machine, it sees a file residing in the host machine as the “Hard Disk”. Whenever a guest machine does any write to disk, it will be written into the file which resides on the host machine
If we select “Fixed storage” and if we choose the size as 10GB then, in host machine ( by default under .VirtualBox/Guest-Machine/Guest-Machine.vdi ) a file will be created with 10GB of size
If we select “Dynamic storage” then, .VirtualBox/Guest-Machine/Guest-Machine.vdi will initially be a small size file, but it will grow whenever the guest machine writes data to the disk.
Choose “Dynamic storage” and click Next.




Enter the maximum size that you want to allocate for the guest machine.
Click Finish. Now a file named “Guest-Machine.vdi” will be created under “.VirtualBox/Guest-Machine/”
Click “Finish” to complete the creation of Virtual Machine.


Now a new “Virtual Machine” is created and it will be in “power off” state.

Installing OS in a Virtual machine

We can install any OS ( personally tested windows and linux ) on a virtual machine. We can install the OS in virtual machine by 2 methods
  • Through OS-DVD
  • Through ISO image of the OS
Here we will cover the installation using an ISO image, although using DVD is very similar to this.
Make sure that the iso file of your distribution is present in the host machine.
Launch “virtualbox”. Select the newly created virtual machine. Click “Settings”.
Now a new window will open which will list out the settings group on left panel and actual setting on the right side as follows.

Select “System”. On the right panel ensure that the boot order is correct ( Similar to setting the boot order in BIOS ).
Use the “Move Up” or “Move Down” button button to change the boot order, and make sure CD/DVD is selected as the “First boot device” and click “Ok”.
The next step is to map the “ISO file” of your distribution to the virtual CD/DVD device.
Under “Settings” go to “Storage”, the following screen will appear.

Click the “CD icon” and choose the “iso file of the OS”, here I used “Debian-Lenny”.
The following screen will appear once you have chosen the ISO file. Click “Ok”.

Now select the virtual machine, and click “Start”. It will start to boot from the CD/DVD which is mapped to the ISO file.
The OS installation is similar to installing an OS in a physical machine.
Once OS is installed successfully, change the “Boot Order” to boot from HDD, and click “Start”. 
Now you can start using the virtual machine as like other machines.


No comments:

ORA-08004: sequence IEX_DEL_BUFFERS_S.NEXTVAL exceeds MAXVALUE

 Error:- IEX: Scoring Engine Harness Error - ORA-08004: sequence IEX_DEL_BUFFERS_S.NEXTVAL exceeds MAXVALUE (Doc ID 2056754.1) SYMPTOMS:- Yo...