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CMSC 421

Creating your VM

Most of the assignments in this class will be programming based. In order to avoid platform issues, as well as make sure you do not damage your hardware, you will have to do all of the assignments inside a Virtual Machine.

This section will guide you through the process of creating a Virtual Machine (VM), and getting Debian up and running. We will be using Virtual Box as our virtualization platform, as Virtual Box is available on Windows, Linux and MacOS. Before we get into that though, you need to make sure your computer satisfies some requirements.

Requirements

  • An x86 CPU (meaning no ARM based apple devices, for example)
  • A decent amount of RAM - probably at least 8GBs
  • A 64-bit operating system (the likelihood you do not have this is pretty low)
  • Your CPU must support virtualization: VT-x for Intel and AMD-V for AMD processors (some modern AMD platforms are calling this option SVM mode now). You can enable this through your bios, if it is supported
Virtual Box is available on the machines in the ITE240 lab running linux!

Disk space:

You will need at least 32 GBs of space on your hard drive to store the VM. If you can allocate more for it, feel free to do it. You can also use a flash drive, or USB drive to backup your VM on that. If you are working on ITE240 you NEED the flash drive to back up the VM.

Running from a USB device will be slow!

Creating the Machine

First you need to get Virtual Box from the official website https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. Make sure to download and install the version matching your host OS (i.e. the OS you are currently running, not the one you want to install).

Click on Machine > New to create a new machine. The options on this screen are pretty self-explanatory. The type and version here refer to the OS you want to install. The machine folder is where you want the VM to be stored. You can leave it at default or change it like I have here. Just make note of where it is, in case you need it. If you cannot see any 64-bit options, that means you have not enabled virtualization!

If you are only seeing a 32-bit option when creating the vm, you do not have virtualization enabled!

Next step configures how much RAM you are giving your VM. 2GB (2048 bytes) should be enough. Feel free to give it more but do not exceed 1/4th of your total amount of RAM! After that you have to create the virtual hard disk for your VM. Select the options in the following order:

  1. Create a virtual hard disk now
  2. VDI (Virtual Box Image)
  3. Dynamically Allocated
  4. Make sure to give it 32GBs here. The default of 8 is nowhere near enough.

You should have your VM now. If you want you can go through the settings to allocate more CPU cores to it. Do not allocate more than half your available cores. Be careful that Virtual Box occupies whole cores, especially on Windows. The slider there is probably wrong. If you have 4 cores and 8 threads (i.e. HyperThreading) you should only move the slider up to 2.