Setting up a Virtual Machine

To illustrate how simple this is, I am going to take the free version of Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and set it up. Now, there are a few things to keep in mind before installing any virtual machine:

• You need a lot of PC memory. Virtual machines actually operate by taking spare PC resources and delegating them to your virtual machine. This means that each virtual machine which is actively running is taking up it’s own chunk of your available memory. I am running Windows XP on a PC with 2 gigs of RAM. This is plenty for virtual machines. However, if I were running a mere 512 MB of RAM, I would be more limited in what I could do because, essentially, two or more operating systems would be using the same pool of memory at the same time.
• Each virtual machine operates as it’s own environment, just like a separate computer. This means, of course, that you are subject to software licensing. For example, I installed Windows XP to a virtual machine and I had to enter a license code and perform activation with Microsoft. All of this takes place as normal, and just because you are running it in a virtual machine does not mean you can get away with using the same copy of Windows.

I downloaded Virtual PC 2004 from the Microsoft website. It comes as a ZIP file, so I simply extracted the file to it’s own folder. In that folder will be a setup.exe which I simply executed. The set up was easy as could be. Once installed, simply start the console in the start menu just like any normal program. To create a new machine, simply press the "New" button. You use a Wizard interface to create your machine. The wizard will ask you simple questions such as the operating system you will be using, the amount of memory to delegate to the machine, whether you want to create a new virtual hard disk, etc. When you are done, the new machine will appear in your console as "not running". To start the machine, highlight it and press "Start". Doing this will open a new window where you will actually watch the virtual machine boot. The boot screen looks very similar to your standard boot screens where it will scan for drives, show the amount of memory available, provide information on your BIOS, etc.

I decided to install Windows XP Pro to my new virtual machine. So, I started the new, blank virtual machine. Just like a normal computer would do with no operating system, it sat there on a black screen telling me to reboot with an operating system. I inserted the Windows CD into the CD-ROM and then used the console menu to send the operating system a Ctrl-Alt-Del in order to reboot. Upon reboot, the virtual machine detected the Windows CD in the CD-ROM and booted from it and started setup. The entire Windows setup process went through inside the console window while I was able to do other work inside the main, host operating system which is Windows.

The process went very smoothly. When the setup needed to reboot, the virtual machine rebooted. I was still able to continue working while this occurred. The only thing which confused me for a bit is that my mouse cursor would get stuck inside the virtual machine window and I could not get out in order to work with my main computer. After some quick research, I found that simply tapping the right ALT key would free my mouse cursor and let me access the rest of my computer.

Virtual PC seems pretty solid under Windows. This would make sense seeing as both are Microsoft products and I was installing yet another copy of Windows inside of the virtual machine. One thing I noticed which was annoying is that there is a lot of screen flickering going on. While the virtual machine window would remain solid, the other windows running on my host machine flicker as if they were being redrawn. It did not affect the performance of my machine at all, but it was still a little annoying for me.

Being that this is a virtual environment, much of the hardware in use by the virtual machine is, too, virtual. For example, the video card in use by the machine is an S3 Trio32. This is not what I have actually installed in my computer, yet this is the virtual video card driver in use by the virtual machine. Adjusting screen resolution in the virtual machine would change the size of the window itself so as to display the machine at actual resolution. Once I installed "VM Additions", I was able to easily move my mouse cursor in and out of the machine, share resources between my host machine and the virtual machine (as network resources), and other convenient tasks. VM Additions is built into Virtual PC 2004 and is simply a guest OS component to Virtual PC which will install into the virtual machine and allow it to interface with the host machine. This is what allows me to share resources or to copy and paste from the host OS into the virtual machine.

Conclusion

Virtual machines are a very convenient method of trying new operating systems or testing software without damaging your computer. Don’t want to mess with setting up dual booting in order to try Linux? Use a virtual machine. Want to perform security testing without risking your actual work environment? Set up a virtual machine and know that whatever infections or security risks you are exposed to, the damage will be limited to the virtual machine. If you damage the guest operating system beyond repair, just delete it and reload a fresh virtual machine. I have shown, in this article, that setting up a virtual machine environment is incredibly easy to do. And, most importantly, can be done for free.

Happy virtual computing!