welcome to the course uh this video is going to be about virtualbox and how it works not how to install it that's in a different video how to install it and how to install something within it that's a different video right now I just want to give you an intro of what are we doing with virtualbox and why do we need it so you're in a class that requires the ability to go through Linux and to go through windows and to go through Mac OS in that process you have to have access to those kinds of computers and if you don't that's a difficulty now on eac's campus we provide the ability right there and this class can either be taken as a hybrid meaning that we do meet once a week and you're expected to be there and during that time we will usually be doing Labs right so that makes it easy you don't have to go through this kind of setup or you can do it full online and then if you do it full online then you you've got to set up virtualbox so prior to showing you how to set it up let's take a look at what it is so let me share my screen here here we are I have become smaller onto the screen here we are and I have got virtualbox running Oracle VM virtualbox it's an absolutely free program and again we'll get into how to install it in a moment you actually in the operating systems class and in the server class we talk about virtualization virtualization has been around for a very long time going all the way back to the 50s it's it's always been one of those things that's been out there the ability for instance to run Windows applications on Mac or Mac applications on Windows those were predominant themes through the 80s and 90s virtualbox is absolutely free and we'll show you how to get to that and you will notice here on the left hand side I have got some operating systems installed and ah some of them I haven't quite I aborted that one there but anyway you know I've I've got a bunch you don't need all this right you don't you don't need to install all these different virtual machines but you will need to in the windows course install Fedora you will need to do that um once you get into security courses if you're doing that you will install Cali and they actually have a virtual box file you can just download instance I should say and you can even install Windows inside of windows so you could install Windows 10 I'm running Windows 11 here I could run Windows 10 inside a virtualbox and do all sorts of things within that virtual environment and not mess with my own environment and that's that's really kind of key when you're having to have your own computer and use your own computer for this kind of thing it's nice not to mess up your own computer in the process of learning and having a virtual system helps you do that so here's the concept here's the idea we are going to run a program like virtualbox that basically is a type 2 hypervisor you can look that up if you'd like and what it does is it presents to the virtual machine that's going to be sitting on top a base system so in other words it's going to hide the actual system that it's running on unless you go through the process of opening some of that up so it's by default it's going to say hey here's your base system and when you install anything on top of that virtual box it doesn't know about the underlying system it just knows that here's here's what I was told I have that virtual box told me this is what I was told by virtualbox and so that's what I can use you could create hard drives in there you can do all sorts of things and it all exists within a particular file which I'll show you in a minute right now what I'm going to do is we're going to take Fedora here and it's powered off and when you click on you know after you've installed it when you click on it you will see on the side a bunch of settings and this button for settings takes you to these settings or you could actually just jump into one of these areas and it's going to take you to the settings right so I want you to understand that right here at the top of settings that takes you to the same place as clicking one of these subcategories same same exact place so let's take a look at what it's doing here so under General this this information is set up as you install so when you do the install you select this and I will tell you virtualbox is pretty dang good that when it sees it oh you're going to install Fedora it it knows what to do with that so you select okay I'm going to do Linux and it says what version and you say Fedora during the install I'm talking about things I'm going to show you so it doesn't matter Advanced will show hey this is where this is going to so this is being stored on the C drive in a virtualbox folder and Fedora now I told it to go there I'm the one that said go there the default is to store it in your basically in your personal user folder then virtualbox but the this is an image that I'm using in class and so I wanted students to be able to get to that anyway here's shared clipboard meaning shared between the host OS that's what we call the OS that you're actually using that's installed on the computer and drag and drop is disabled so you could enable those things now the reason they're disabled is because viruses so if you're messing around in a virtual device in a virtual environment and you've got the clipboard shared and a virus exploits that that it could transfer into your host OS so that's why they've got that defaulted to be disabled here's a description that you can give it and here's where you can turn on disk encryption now we don't want to do that that's going to slow things down but this would basically mean I'm going to make sure that if somebody was deciphering this file they got the file where this virtual machine exists it would be really really super difficult for them to take a look at that information normally we don't mess with this again this is kind of set up as you go through it uh the system you might want to mess with later though because this is powered off I can change these things imagine that a lot of these settings will be grayed out if you're actually in the virtual machine because it doesn't want you to all of a sudden change your hard disk space or change how much RAM you have that's not something we usually do on the Fly within our own personal computers so um I've given Fedora here four gigs and you'll notice that up here it shows me how much I really have on the system which I have 16 gigs you know that's that's what the conversion is I've got 16 gigs so I could give it eight right now what this is also showing is hey when you start to get into this area where it's kind of pink or red uh you're really starting to steal too much away from the host OS so don't do that so slide it back and forth as much as you want but don't start stealing too much from your host OS otherwise the whole thing will slow down your host OS needs Ram to run too right and usually if you're running Windows 10 or 11 it's going to take about four gigs now since we're talking about Ram let's talk about something that's important virtual machines I have students ask me hey um you know I'm looking to get a new computer I want to make sure it works with all the courses I'm going to take within the computer field what should I do you know what are the specs what should I do well virtualization is actually one of the few things that will actually take advantage of how much RAM you have if I'm only going to run Fedora by itself I can up this to eight gigs very easily and not bother my system at all because let's pull up our task manager here opened on another screen so let me pull that over and let's take a look at performance here and let's take a look at we're using eight I'm using almost eight gigs on this machine and honestly I've got a lot of special stuff running to do that so if I give it eight I'm still got a gig left for everything to work fine now the truth is is Fedora doesn't need that most operating systems unless you're really using them for tons of stuff do not need it so what this really helps out with let's whoops right there is that I could run Fedora and I could run Linux Mint together or I could run Fedora and Cali and that would use a total of eight gigs and I would still leave eight for my OS right so having more RAM comes in very beneficial if you're going to run multiple VMS at the same time or multiple operating systems at the same time if that's not something that you're doing then you really don't need it the same thing will hold true for the processors so I'm giving it one CPU and I'm telling it you can use a hundred percent of that CPU I should have left it open my task manager here go to Performance again sorry and let's see what I've got for CPUs I have got eight cores and I'm giving this one so that's another area where virtual machines will take your processing power so if you have for instance a dual core i5 very common in a low end budget notebook or a ryzen I5 with two cores uh when you launch this and say go ahead and take one whole core that's what this is dealing with and go ahead and use all of it those two cores are now used you've got your your OS using it and now you've got the virtual OS using it right the one in the virtual machine you've used both course so having more cores then helps you out since this one has eight cores I could easily say you know what I'm going to give you two cores and you can use all of that if you would like to use it that's uh it's interesting because we do some very difficult classes like networking is a lot more difficult than than uh you know the server class and the in the windows class um but this class windows or server whichever one you're in or both those courses will actually use more of your computer than networking or even ethical hacker and that kind of stuff right we we sometimes erroneously believe that a more difficult information like ethical hacking would therefore meet a more powerful computer and that's not true it depends on what you're doing so we're running virtual machines in here I would recommend to students that if you're going to use this you gotta at least have two cores and you gotta at least have eight gigs now that doesn't mean you can't use it but you should expect it to react slowly and you should expect not to really use your host OS while you're running your virtual machine so I'm not saying it's impossible for you right if you've got a four gig system and you're running Windows 7 or Windows 10 on that system and you've only got two cores on that system and don't say to yourself well McBride told me I got to go out and buy a new computer that's not true you'll be able to use that system it's just that it will be slower because you're going to start using a huge amount of resources on that system right you're going to say uh you only get one CPU because the other one has to go to my system and when it's time for you know the RAM on your system you're like I only got four gigs so I can't give you four gigs I can only give you two gigs I can only give you half of that and of course the operating system is going to run slower because both are wanting forward but it's definitely possible to do it you can definitely do it so I don't want anybody just running out going oh I better do this right I'm just saying that hey uh if you're in the situation where you're buying a computer that's stuff you need to know about that's that is and I and I tell students that I may have been I may have already told you that before you ever took this class so anyway I'm Gonna Bump this back up to four because I'm not going to have a problem with that usually you are not messing with any of this but there is a boot order for instance I don't have a floppy so I don't really need that checked on yeah it doesn't matter you can leave it checked on or off it doesn't really matter I don't have an optical drive I'm not going to do that I'm going to say just boot from the hard disk and you usually don't change any of the rest of this unless like it says special os's only and you can do a little research on what does this mean that they tell you a little bit but usually you don't change that stuff same here you usually don't change that physical address extension feature of the host CPU will uh sorry will be exposed to the virtual machine so this may or may not you know you could enable it or not is what I'm saying and then acceleration we don't really mess with them right so really all you're doing here and as I said this is all during the setup too it asks you all this what you want during the setup so you don't have to come back in here unless you want to now on display that is usually something that we always change because even during the setup it will put it way down here in other words it'll say you only have about um 24 Megs of of video memory which these days usually you have much more than that so I usually Max that out and I usually enable 3D acceleration because it's been a long time since we've had cards that don't do 3D acceleration right so I usually I usually go ahead and turn those on but again you can see how it runs initially and then come in and change this if you'd like all right so we'll get into storage later and audio we don't really change any of that or we don't change the networking or shared folders or any of the rest of this um I will show you storage in another video because I'm just a little heftier but the thing that you need to know is that as you set up it creates some kind of storage space that pretends like the hard drive so right here we're seeing Fedora vdi and what I'm going to do is actually power this up now let's start it so you can see what is happening on the inside like what is photo are looking at it actually launched on the main screen so let me pull it over for you this one will show a little snapshot uh and then pay attention to these these little things at least once I'm going to click through them because there's no reason to just show that right now but pay attention to what they say Don't just clip through them so that you understand how things are working and my analysis a little messed up there there it goes so there I am um this is my install so I just put my name on it the the ones at EAC will have EC on it the door has a version of Linux and it's what the book uses and so that's why we have that set up and there it is it's using the gnome interface that's what you're seeing is known with a little tiny start bar down here basically or Dock and then being able to get to all the applications now what I was going to show you is let's just jump over to files and then let's see how it's actually showing the file so we start in our home home directory there and we're going to jump into computer right so right here it's saying hey you got a hard disk and it's named computer and uh you got 16 gigs whoops let me go back yeah 16.7 gigs of 20 available so it's seeing this physical drive it's seeing a physical drive there now I'm going to come back over because I do have enough RAM to do this kind of stuff I'm going to come over and let's open up let's just open up doc six two here I found it online someplace and of course it opened over there on the other screen but notice in dos62 it says uh it's got nine Megs of video memory because that's what I gave it let's actually look at the settings so let's go to storage and there it is there's a Windows vdi once again that's what it says and it says that that's a hard dose that's what that little icon means so if I come over here and I look at my C drive and I've got to use the key to get out of that there we are because dos doesn't it doesn't know anything about virtual machines so it can't get out of that space there any case let's do a dir of of our machine here and it says there's six files and I basically have a gig free back then doc 16 to Gig that would never take up that kind of space What I'm trying to show you is that I have a volume here that it seizes the C drive and of course that really is that vdi file that exists on the computer now this brings us to another point I uh just exited out of here so if I hit the X on this screen it's going to say hey what do you want to do would you like me to power off the machine notice it send the shutdown signal is grayed out that's because dos622 does not know how to do that you just on those machines you flip the switch and the power goes off so that's all you got and I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and save the machine State and say okay to that and away it goes and it that's what I'm saying and it says saved starter back up using this because it's so small that I'll start back up and it won't take too long to get it going and look at that I'm right back where I was so you'd never have to shut down these VMS you can just say hey save the machine State and it'll come right back to where you were same thing here I've got Fedora running still of course and I'm going to remove my picture so I can move the door a little bit hit that and notice it says hey send the shutdown signal if I do that it will actually send that signal to this virtual machine and go ahead and power it down I don't need to do that I'm going to say save the machine State hit okay this one will take a little longer uh and your machine might take quite a bit longer it depends on the age of the machine and it's basically just taking that whole state and saving it then I can come back into that so I'll get back up here to Fedora that says saved and I can start it up and it's going to be right back where it was so you never really have to power them down uh you only Power them down I will have students that'll say hey this isn't working right and guess what I'll tell them restart it all right that's what you would do with your computer this is no different and you would restart that computer so there it is oh it's not quite behaving right but that's okay it'll get there it usually takes a little while to get there and go back to activities back down here save the machine State and it will save it right where I was fantastic so I tell students just save the machine State and then you know start back up when you need it it is using memory it is using that storage space and then choosing that memory up until you hit save and then it'll release that for your computer to use so that's that's kind of a little tour of virtualbox I will open up um let's open up yeah let's I like meant thanks man I that's uh I prefer to use limits in most of those most of the time when I'm dealing with limits it's got some good features it's not too heavy weighted uh open Seuss has got a bunch of stuff it's kind of like a Windows replacement it's already got tons of stuff installed anyway you you know take a look at the mouse pointer Integrations turned on so on there I am that's Linux Mint changing that resolution there that's why that screen got bigger and then I'm going to show you up here file machine view input devices and help so there's Linux Mint it's actually using um cinnamon I think yeah cinnamon right here so the graphic graphic user interface is a little different a little different a little more like Windows and you can put different graphic user into places like that but up here the these menus are to the virtual machine see you're running Oracle VM virtualbox and so you've got file preferences network manager reset or close the dang thing right that's doing the same thing as clicking the X machine take a snapshot uh I would tell you take take a snapshot every so often because what a snapshot is is like I'll call this clean in other words I haven't done anything to this yet so I would say when you first create a virtual machine create a snapshot that you can go back to that's what snapshots allow you to do virtualization is fantastic they use this kind of stuff big dog servers use this kind of stuff all the time we'll take snapshots every so many minutes automatically anyway the idea is is that I've got that snapshot there I come through and I really screw something up and I'm like oh I'm gonna have to reinstall Linux Mint no I don't need to I can actually go back to the snapshot and re um reinstall the snapshot clip that snapshot back in place and then it's back to this clean state which is fantastic so take a snapshot when you first right after you first install something and feel free to take a few as you go along so as you're doing some things you've changed it and you're like I like the way this is now take a snapshot at that point uh we can look at file manager the file manager see will pull up there's your drives that you have or don't have options usually you never have to mess with any of that but it's there where most people will spend their time is on view uh realize if you go into full screen mode you need to know the host key which is the right control key and F otherwise people like how do I get out of this mode how do I make this change I actually like scale mode and so it says right here hey note by pressing Ctrl C I mean host C is they mean whatever that host key is and that's control so whoops it jumped over to the other screen so there it is scaled meaning that I can now make this as big as I want and it will do its best at scaling that correctly now what was controlling the size of the screen before is actually in here what is the resolution that the virtual machine inside is set to and that controls how big that is normally when you install Linux it's going to say ah 40 by 600 or are um whatever a little 809 it's usually 700 by a thousand something like that it'll it'll kind of set it um so I think to me uh I will often just automatically set it to scale because then I don't have to worry about coming in here not joking and coming in and going uh how do I change how do I change the background so that oh this is icons oh desktop settings okay let's go here uh no that's not it right if you're not familiar with getting around in this see but here's the the current layout was 1280x768 which I had to up so I upped it until it got to that point scaling is nice notice up here uh where's my menus oh oh no that just pulls up stuff inside yeah you're that I hit the Windows key that's where it popped that up we're gonna get those menus back so if you don't know um the keys that they're telling you here see it said scale mode host C so that was Ctrl C and it tells you hey you're going to have to hit Ctrl C to get back out of that so you got to pay attention to that stuff that's under view take screenshots right there recording but at the same time because I'm running in a window here I can actually just take a screenshot Snipping tool so I can actually right here which I I have a video that shows this I can take it a screenshot within windows and I can use whatever I have in Windows to actually build my assignment right so I this is a screenshot now so you don't have to do the screenshots within Linux even though you could you definitely could uh their input and then your different devices so for instance if you attached a USB drive and it's like why isn't that I can't find it in Linux it's not in Linux it's not there I don't know where it is um this is where you'd find it this is all the USB drives that are actually currently running and working you don't want to just mess with this for instance I am using this for audio right now and so if I just kick that off and say hey go over to Linux What's Happening Here is going to die in Windows and so you do need to be aware of that but USB is very very handy so you're you're you may get to an assignment that's like oh copy this to a flash drive you plug in your Flash run you're like I can't get the dang thing to be seen in Linux it won't come up this is where you do that you would find it right here someplace and you would click it like this is actually a big hard drive and so I can click that and then that'll be available right here inside of that VM so so that's just a little tour of getting around in virtualbox my other video will now show this is how you install it so I'm going to go ahead and close Linux here and I will save the machine state Linux Mint to be specific so we'll let that save and now it's back to here and I'm going to go ahead and close task manager I'll just go ahead and close that down then I can come back and load that up whenever I want if you got questions let me know