Hands on: How to build a virtual machine

I have looked at the free VMWare Player before and described how it can be used with a virtual network-attached storage (Nas) appliance.

However, you can’t create virtual machines with VMWare Player. There are tools that allow you to do that, and we'll concentrate on virtual network servers, starting with Microsoft’s free Virtual Server 2005 R2 package.

The first thing to understand about Virtual Server 2005 R2 is that, although a major Windows server application, fully supported by Microsoft and recommended for production use, it’s available completely free. OK, it’ll cost in terms of download time and bandwidth usage, but otherwise there’s no charge.

Another benefit is that you don’t need a full-blown server to try it out, as Virtual Server 2005 can be hosted on a Windows XP PC, either 32-bit or 64-bit. However, the XP support is really only provided for testing and development work. For serious production use, Windows Server 2003 is the recommended host platform.

Lastly, although it’s not possible to host Virtual Server on a Linux system, when Microsoft released the latest Virtual Server 2005 R2 package, it did make Linux an officially supported guest OS and released custom additions to help optimise Linux virtual machines (VMs).

Getting started
Virtual Server 2005 is available from Microsoft, but with the introduction of the free download, the Standard package was dropped, so the only choice now is the Enterprise version. You also need to ensure that you choose the right download for your hardware, as both 32-bit and 64-bit implementations are available. The 32-bit product will run on 64-bit processors but not vice versa.

You have to register to get the download but that’s all, and at 28.4MB it’s not a huge file. Installation is pretty easy too – just run the setup program and agree to the licence terms.

You will, though, need to have IIS running on the host system, as management is all done via a browser. But that’s not difficult, and the setup program takes care of firewall changes to allow remote access to the administration website it creates.

Building a virtual machine
Connect to the administration website and, after the authentication process, you’ll be presented with a menu-driven interface through which you can both create and manage VMs.

Click on Create on the left-hand side and you’ll be asked for a VM name and an amount of memory to allocate to it. The figure you enter here will depend on a number of factors, including the amount of physical Ram in the host server, the guest OS and the number of other VMs that will be run simultaneously.

Fortunately, the memory allocation can be changed later but beware of having to do so with XP virtual machines, as this kind of change can cause Windows to prompt for a licence re-activation.

You’ll also be prompted to create a virtual hard disk – effectively a file on the host disk that will be used to contain the guest operating system, applications and data files. Create it here and, by default, you’ll get a dynamically expanding disk.

So, although you’re asked for the size, that’s treated as a maximum only and Virtual Server will allocate physical space on demand, as and when required by the guest OS.

A fixed-size virtual disk can be created if you prefer, but you’ll need to do that separately before building the virtual machine.

There are a couple of more advanced options to build linked disks too, and you’ll be given the option of emulating either an IDE or SCSI interface, which may not seem of great importance but some guest operating systems can be fussy when it comes to what you set.

If in doubt, try IDE first, as SCSI support requires the SP1 update to Virtual Server 2005 R2, which was only available in beta format at the time of writing.

Finally, you need to connect the virtual machine to the Lan. That usually means assigning the default virtual network adapter to a physical card in the host machine.

The virtual machine will be assigned its own IP addresses on that adapter, effectively using the host connection as a bridge to the wider network. Alternatively, you can opt to connect the virtual network adapter to a private Lan, which will only allow it to connect to other VMs on the Virtual Server.

Having done that, click the Create button and Virtual Server will go away and build the new VM for you. However, there’s still work to be done, as the end result is just like a brand new PC waiting to be switched on and have an operating system installed.

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