I had the opportunity to see “Terminator Salvation” this past weekend. I’m feeling some solidarity with John Connor and his frustrations with “the machines”. Of course his machines are real and spend all of their time trying to kill him while mine just frustrate me and are “virtual”.
I’ve been spending some time learning how to setup and manage Oracle Virtual Servers (OVS). OVS provides the ability to setup up multiple logical or Virtual Machines (VM) on a single hardware platform. These VM’s can be configured with different operating systems and have access to the physical hardware components including disk arrays, ethernet cards, memory, CPU cores and CD drives. You can stop and start each VM as needed, particularly if you are limited by memory or processors.
This makes VM’s a popular choice for test environments where you want to set something up, test it and then shut it down for later use. OVS is designed to provide the software to define and execute multiple VM’s and some client software to manage them remotely.
Underneath the covers OVS is built on the open-source Xen package which Oracle has taken and modified. Though there are various GUI tools for using with Xen, Oracle provides a GUI tool, the Oracle Virtual Machine Manager (OVM), to configure and manage multiple VM’s. OVM stores configuration information in a local XE Oracle database and runs in your IE or Firefox browser.
My goal was to take an Dell 2950 and install several Virtual Machines (VM) configured with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3. I also wanted to setup a VM with the latest version of the 10gR2 database (10.2.0.4).
One of my challenges was that I didn’t have a second Linux “server” to act as the OVM so I had to use my laptop to “manage” the Virtual Machines and that required installing Linux or in my case, OEL5.3, in a VMWare environment on the laptop. The high-level process involved the following steps:
1. Downloaded Oracle VM Server and created an installation CD
2. Booted the Dell using the VM Server CD and installed that on the Dell.
3. Downloaded VMWare to my laptop and setup a Virtual Machine for OEL5.3
4. Downloaded Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3 and wrote it to five CD’s. You can also download a DVD version which is what I also did.
5. Installed OEL5.3 in the VMWare VM on my laptop (which was already running Windows XP)
6. Booted OEL5.3 on my laptop and installed the Oracle Virtual Machine Manager (which includes the XE database)
At this point I had an Oracle VM server on the Dell and a way to manage it from my laptop using the Linux-based Virtual Machine Manager.
I was now ready to enter the “virtual frustration” zone…
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How did you make *iso to be executed on Windows XP
Sanjay,
I’m not sure exactly how to answer the question because the only thing I used XP for was as my Virtual Machine Manager installation (I have since moved it over to an Oracle Enterprise Linux server). I have setup several Virtual Machines that use Windows 2000 since we have licenses for that. To do that I created a new VM and loaded the Win2K software from a CD inserted in the physical server. Once I had patched with all of the latest MS security patches, I saved it as a template so I didn’t have to repeat the steps in the future.
I hope that helps. My apologies for the slow response!