Part 1: Preparing a virtual server using VirtualBox

Pre Requisites

• Download and install VirtualBox – I have a Ubuntu 12.04 but the instructions here apply to any operation system, including Windows or OS X or Solaris
• Download Debian CD 1 image. At time of writting this tutorial, Debian is in 6.0.5 version

Instructions

Let’s prepare VirtualBox to install a Debian virtual server. It’s an easy task, just follow instructions below. The very first time you open VirtualBox, we have no virtual machine configured yet. To create one, click on New button.

VirtualBox will open an wizard. We just need to follow wizard’s steps as below.

Here is the wizard’s first window. It’s a welcome screen with Next, Back, Cancel buttons. Click on Next button.

Let’s define a name for our server. I’ll be using “TestServer”. This name is used just to identify the virtual machine in VirtualBox. It’ not the host name. Virtual machine’s host name will be defined when installing Debian.

Choose “Linux” in “Operating System” combo box and  “Debian” (32 bits version) in “Version” combo box. I haven’t tested 64 bit version although VirtualBox has support for it. Feel free to try 64 bit version, I think the instructions below will also work for it.

Now let’s set the memory size. Wizard’s recommendation is 384 MB. We will be using 512 MB, I think it will be enough to run a base system with Gnome interface. You should have at least 2GB RAM in the host machine to avoid  system laziness. The best set up would be 4GB. 25% of the memory will be dedicated to the virtual server.

We need a virtual hard drive. Since this is the first time we are creating a virtual machine, let’s check “Start-up Disk” and select “Create new hard disk”. We can have multiple hard drives in a virtual machine, put for simplicity let’s create just one.

Choose “VDI (VirtualBox Disk image)” type.

Now choose “Dynamically allocated” insted of “Fixed size”. Dynamically allocated advantage is that we don’t need to worry about  har drive size as we add new software to our virtual server. Hard drive size will grow as needed. The limit will be free space in the hard drive’s host machine.

In the next screen, in Location field, wizard already fills with default path to store virtual hard drives. VirtualBox created a “VirtualBox VMs” folder inside your /home. In this folder it creates a subfolder whose name is the virtual machine name we created in the first step – in this case is “TestServer”. VirtualBox will create and store virtual server’s hard drive VDI file inside of it. In my machine setup it created the virtual hard drive in /home/luiz/VirtualBox VMs/TestServer/TestServer.vdi

Virtual hard drive default size is 8GB. In our case, since we have created a dynamically allocated virtual hard disk, it doesn’t matter, so let’s keep the default and not worry about it.

Now a summary is shown with all options we chose in the previous screen. Confirm that everything is OK and then click on Create button to create a virtual hard drive for our machine.

The last screen is another summary with all information we provided in all previous screens. If everything is OK click on Create button to create the virtual machine.

Going back to VirtualBox main screen we can see “TestServer” virtual box listed at left. At right we have TestServer’s configurations like memory, boot sequence, video memory, storage information. Scroll down to see all of them. After being created virtual machine status is “Powered Off”. To boot it just click on  “Start” green button.

Since we still don’t have any operational system instaled in the virtual server, after clicking on “Start”, a new wizard (First Run Wizard) window is shown:

This is just another welcome screen with some information about the steps needed to install an operational system in the virtual server. Click on Next button to go to the next wizard window.

Let’ select an operation system media. We will be using ISO image that we have downloaded from Debian’s site. Just browse for debian-6.0.5-i386-CD-1.iso file. Please note that we just need to download the first CD.

A summary screen is shown. Click on Start button to boot our virtual server.

In the next part we will be installing Debian. See ya.