Ask HN: How do you use Virtualbox? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you use Virtualbox?

8 pointsswah12 comments

I installed the same Ubuntu that I run on linode on a Virtualbox on my Mac. But I couldn't find out exactly how folks work with Virtualbox.

Do you make VBox fullscreen, and just work completely inside the graphical environment? Or do you edit on the Mac and compile on the VBox? Or you have your VBox only for testing deployment, not development?

The motivation for trying out VBox was this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998389

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I pretty much use it in all of the ways specified above:

Sometimes I use it for development: I may need a development environment that I can not set up on my desktop for some random reason.

Other times, I use it to test software on various OS installs. As an example, I recently had the need to test an installer and software on Vista 32/64, XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008. That would've been a pain in the butt for me without VMs. (Handy tip that I use, I often take snapshots of my VMs after I first set them up. This allows me to roll back to a 'fresh' install any time I want.)

Other times, I'm setting up multiple linux boxes to test how I want the multiple machines to interact or to test multi-server deployment without actually having to pay to bring up more servers.

Sometimes I just need to set something up that matches my production environment so that I can test possible changes and see what's going to work and what's going to break.

I have a full dual monitor linux development environment setup on my windows box as well so that I can do my development from there if I need to.

Essentially: Your options are limitless.

I have a CentOS box that runs a few headless VBox VM's. I use them for development / testing before pushing changes live. I have one of them setup pretty much exactly like our production server.

I do all of that work over ssh. None of the VMs have an X window system installed.

I don't right now...

There are issues [1] with running VirtualBox mac under the 64bit kernel. Disabling VT-x helps for some people but that precludes you from running a 64bit client.

It's a reported issue [2] but in the meantime you can boot your shiny new i7 MBP into the 32bit kernel.

[1] http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39368 [2] http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8474

Check out Vagrant - http://vagrantup.com

Quote:

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments.

By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox, Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments.

For backend work I run virtualbox minimized with a mapped drive on the host where I run my IDE, etc.

For front-end testing I run various windows virtual boxen windowed on the second monitor while my IDE is up on the main monitor. In this case my work files are local on the mac and shared to the Vbox for previewing on Windows (including IE6 sadly).

I'm more interested in backend work now. When you say mapped do you mean the "shared folders" via guest additions ?

Yes. Setup networking between guest and host, then on the host connect to the share on the guest.

I'm not sure whether you're doing this on purpose, but just incase: you don't need to set up networking on the guest to have shared folders. Virtualbox has native functionality for this (using the guest additions that the grantparent mentions).

Hmm, I guess I didn't know that.

(I've always setup networking anyway since I need HTTP in and out of the guest as well.)

I installed it this weekend. I use it to run node on Ubuntu from Win7. I run it fullscreen and use emacs. Works great so far.

I do that too. Also, I use it to run ruby / rails because trying to set that up on Win7 sucked too much. Sometimes, a vm is just better.

I use virtualbox for running Windows, which I sometimes need for testing or when I have to use MS Office for some reason... In that case I make it fullscreen and work in the graphical environment.

To pass files from/to the virtual OS I use a virtualbox shared folder, I have networking inside the box disabled for security reasons.

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