Introduction to Virtualization - VMware Workstation 8
Transcript
com with another training video on virtualization. So, the last class we talked about the different types of virtualization, specifically terminal services based virtualization and x86 virtualization. In x86 virtualization, we talked about two types of x86 hypervisors. Type one hypervisors being VMware vSphere and uh Hyper-V as examples of type one hypervisors that we gave. And type two, which we'll focus on in this class, being VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, and a slew of others such as KVM that can be installed on Linux. Today, we'll talk about VMware Workstation, so we'll get a pretty good overview of what an actual virtual machine really looks like in production.
We'll take a look at a virtual machine that I had built before. It's a Windows XP virtual machine that I use for some backwards compatibility testing, which is a really great use case for client-based virtualization, which is what uh type two hypervisors are commonly referred to sometimes. So, we'll go ahead and take a look at our Windows XP uh virtual machine. We'll look at the settings. Uh we'll boot the machine up, take a look at the uh virtual hardware that's presented to the virtual machine, and really get a good little deep dive into what a virtual machine looks like from a logical sense and a practical sense as well.
So, looking at our Windows XP machine, we're going to right-click on it. We're going to go to break. Right-click, go to settings. And we see this is a pretty typical uh machine that would be running XP. We have 1 gig of memory, a single processor, a 40 gig hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, uh a network adapter. It also has a USB controller, a sound card, uh printer pass-through for my local printer, and of course a video card.
We'll go ahead and power up this virtual machine. And this error message, or warning actually, is I made a copy of this virtual machine specifically for this video. And VMware Workstation recognizes that this hasn't been powered up on my particular machine. One of the great things about virtualization is that you can make your virtual machines extremely portable. So, once you spend some time in creating a virtual machine, it's basically a set of configuration files and and a hard disk file, and that machine that virtual machine can be copied to any other directory or computer that runs a compatible virtualization platform.
In this case, VMware Workstation. So, we'll go ahead and note that I copied it. And I continue booting the virtual machine. I don't know if you guys caught that really quickly, but we had a BIOS option when the virtual machine first booted that gave us the option of entering the BIOS. So, this virtual machine, actually like any other virtual machine, has a BIOS, and has everything you would expect a physical machine to have. So, when a operating system, and in this case Windows XP, is installed, from the operating system perspective the operating system is unaware that it's actually installed in a virtual set of hardware.
This is called full virtualization. In our previous class, we talked about full virtualization, para-virtualization, and hardware-assisted virtualization. In full virtualization, the entire stack of hardware is replicated and presented to the virtual machine as a virtual machine. In para-virtualization, which is which happens a lot in a mainframe world the virtual OS or the guest OS is aware that it's a virtual machine running on hardware. So, we'll take a look at our Windows XP machine and see if we can tell the difference from the operating system perspective.
One of the great advantages of Windows I'm sorry of VMware Workstation 7 and 8 and probably as as far as I've been using VMware Workstation is that it's really designed to give a developer application tester anybody who has the need to regularly work in a virtual machine the look and feel of a full desktop. So, we hit the hot key control alt enter we'll actually get a full screen of our Windows XP and as you can see, it's really hard to tell just by looking at the screen that we're in a virtual machine.
We'll take a look at the properties of our virtual machine. As you can see, this is a Windows X XP Professional machine license. Uh it tells us the CPU. This sign that we're running on a virtual machine, at least from the end user's perspective. You'll probably ever never see a i7 2630QM processor with just one uh CPU. So, if we went to task if we started our task manager This is a i7 processor. And if we go to performance, we'll see only one CPU versus the uh eight that we normally see with this processor.
The four plus the four hypervisor hyperthreading. So, we'll go to hardware in our device manager. And we'll have this general tab up as well. So, again, we see that this is 1 GB RAM, one uh physical processor. We go to our processors tab, we see our Intel processor. We go to our network adapter. We have a VMware um based adapter installed. Um system devices, we're going to see all the typical system devices we see in a physical hardware piece of hardware with in addition to that some VMware specific hardware that mimics the bus controller and uh host device.
Now, let's take a look at our physical machine. We'll switch back. Go to a command prompt. And our physical machine also has a IP address on that same network. The 134 the 192 134 uh 24 network. We'll find that adapter in a second, I hope. Oh, there we go. 1. Let's go all the way out and make sure we're not confusing the two different environments. So, right now the IP address is NAT'd. And the this machine can get out to the internet just as if uh I had a firewall connected to a NAT'ing firewall connected to this 192 164.
24 network. And the internet and every machine outside of my workstation would only see the public IP or in this case a secondary private IP of my Windows 7 machine. So, if I wanted to, I could actually go back in and change this from a NAT configuration to a bridge configuration. Go back into my Windows XP machine. Do a IP release. Then a IP config renew. Now I have a IP address on my physical network. So, let's compare that to my workstation.
And then if you see my workstation has a dot uh eight IP address and if the Windows firewall if the firewall is not installed on the Windows XP machine I should be able to ping the Windows XP machine. The firewall is on that machine, but if the firewall wasn't on that machine I could ping that machine. So my network actually sees both IP addresses my If I went to the logs of my firewall I'd see IP I'd see a MAC address for the dot 19 machine and I'd see a uh MAC address for the uh Windows 7 host.
So as you can see our VMware Workstation has completely created a container of hardware self-contained container of hardware. And this environment is completely separate from our physicals hardware environment. As you can see this from a uh when you when we take a step back from not just a enterprise use case but even in for a consumer the ideal of being able to run a completely separate operating system that's self-contained has a lot of appeal. Uh we gave the use of a Mac user that wanted to use a Windows on their workstation.
Uh that's common. VMware Workstation most definitely isn't the only solution to do that. Parallels is extremely popular on the Mac platform as is VirtualBox Box which is a free application. VMware Workstation most definitely has some advantages that we'll be leveraging throughout the next series of videos. Uh VMware does an incredibly great job of virtualizing the x64-bit chipset and being able to allow us to run what's called next to nested virtual machines. So, what we'll do in other classes, you'll see that I have a ESXi host, Hyper-V host.
We'll actually run Hyper-V or ESX or maybe even both inside of VMware Workstation and actually install virtual machines inside of those operating systems. com virtualization scenarios. Again, if you have any further questions, you can visit the work website. Uh feel free to comment on this YouTube video and I'll be checking in for comments. Thanks and talk to you next video.
