Relation between ISO, Virtual machines, VMware, VMX file and VMDK file - comparison

Can someone assist me in relating ISO, Virtual machines, VMware, VMX file and VMDK file together?
I need to understand how all these components relate together. Is there any diagram or chart that shows the linkage among these components.

ISO = Usually an Image of a CD or DVD which you can burn, resulting in a duplicate of the original
Virtual machines = Guest operating systems within a VMware Host server
VMware = The manufacturer of the leading virtualization software.
VMX = the configuration file for a virtual machine
VMDK = The actual virtual disk, or contents of the virtual machine.

It would be hard to put everything together into a diagram because as the commenters already indicated these are very different things at very different levels of abstraction. I'll try to find a relation anyway:
You can imagine a virtual machine being a real computer (== physical machine) simulated in software. Wikipedia From 10,000 ft a VM is a program that emulates hardware and thereby allows you to do anything you could do with a normal computer, e.g., install an operating system.
There are many implementations of virtual machines (with varying performance and feature sets), for instance Microsoft's Hyper-V, Qemu, Virtualbox. VMware is a company that specializes in providing a range of virtual machine implementations as well as many products related to their VMs. In your case VMware probably refers to one of their desktop products such as VMware Player or VMware Workstation.
When you set up a virtual machine in one of these solutions, they provide you means of configuring your virtual computer. Imagine this similar to buying the single parts of a PC in the shop: you need a network card, some processors, memory, hard disks, ... and then you put it all together. This configuration needs to be stored somewhere and in the case of VMWare's desktop products this is what gets stored in a VMX file.
Sometimes you want to have access to a CD-ROM in your virtual machine. You may get this buy passing your physical computer's CD drive to the VM directly. Most of the time however, you will instead pass a CD-ROM image from your physical PC's hard drive. A common format for such CD images is the ISO format. Most VM implementations allow you to simply add such a file to your virtual machine and make it look as if it was a real CD in a real drive.
One of the cool use cases of virtual machines is that you can preconfigure a custom operating system along with a bunch of applications. Then you can take a 'snapshot' of this computer and pass it around to your friends. They can then boot this snapshot in their VM and directly work with all the cool apps you installed without having to go through the tedious steps of installing and configuring the whole system. Such a 'snapshot' is called a virtual appliance. In the case of VMware these appliances are stored in VMDK files.

A late post, but...
First, an ISO file is basically a 'virtual CD/DVD'... which may be mounted in a virtual machine. So there is a direct correlation... analogous even ...with the other entities.
BjoernD may have a point. ;)
As for a Chart...
Computers
Actual | Virtual (simulated in software)
-------|---------------------------------
Dell | "Windows Virtual PC"
HP | "VirtualBox"
etc | "VMware"
| VMware program creates/loads...
| VMware Virtual machine =
myPC.VMX (configuration file)
+
myPC.VMDK (virtual computer system in a file)
+ (optional) myCD-DVD.ISO file
...where myCD-DVD.ISO is a 'virtual' CD/DVD drive.
It is a 'mounted' ISO file (image of CD/DVD disk)
The VMware software lets you run a 'virtual' version of a computer... fullscreen or in a window ...on another computer.

Related

PocketBeagle Debian internet over USB

I am trying to follow directions from the book Exploring Beaglebone. I have also viewed this video which is wrong OSes. I have also read some posts (one, two).
Observed anomalies:
Network Preferences shows a warning of a self-assigned IP address and inability to support internet sharing:
macOS Network Preferences
Debian does not have a 'udhcpc' command but the following was executed:
Screen output
Has anyone been able to do internet over USB on macOS 10.13.2 and Debian 9 IoT?
tnx,
Jon
So a quick intro to what options you have:
Manually enable routing + NAT (No idea how to do that on OSX)
Configure the board system to use DHCP client functionality instead to talk to a shared connection from e.g. OSX.
Permanently disable the script (should be in /opt somewhere) that assigns the current network settings and enables DHCP serving. Might also just be a part of a larger script.
Enable DHCP client (e.g. in /etc/network/interfaces or by using Connman or Network-manager)
The default Debian image should also expose a serial console over USB. You can use this to gain access to and configure the system even when your network connection doesn't work. Of course, the debug-UART should work as well, by using a USB-serial converter.
Another note: the DHCP client on Debian for manual execution is usually dhclient. The interface on the Beaglebone side will be named usb0 or usb1 (as newer images use two types for increased compatibility e.g. with OSX).
A good place to ask questions is usually the Beagleboard Google group

How can I set up a OpenVMS VM environment

I am looking to set up a VM running openVMS if there is a free version or possibly freeVMS? I essentially want to set up a VMS environment with the EVE and EDI editors.
I run a Mac so I'd like to set it up on that, I could sort out a PC if necessary but I'd rather not.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks
James
If you are not going to use OpenVMS commercially you can get free licenses from here. They will also provide you with access to downloadable media once you register.
The only free emulator I'm aware of that runs on OS X is the VAX emulator in SIMH. See the SIMH github project.
There are various Alpha emulators; most assume a Windows host, though I think there is now one that runs on Linux.
You can use a virtual machine running Windows XP on MAC OS X, and install PersonalAlpha (by Stromasys) in there. All you need then are the OpenVMS Hobbyist Licenses and media to install from.
BTW, these are the free Alpha emulators running on Windows I know about:
PersonalAlpha by Stromasys
FreeAXP by Migration Specialties
For linux:
AXPNCE by Stromasys
Commercial Alpha (and VAX) emulators:
vtAlpha by AVTware. This is basically a modified Linux with an Alpha emulator. They have no plans for a free version for non-commercial use.
Avanti and AvantiFlex by Migration Specialties.
Charon AXP products by Stromasys

how to load large Ntriple data into jena tdb

I'm using Dbpedia in my project and I wanted to create a local sparql end point as the online one is not reliable. I downloaded data dumps (large NT files) and decided to use Jena TDB. Using the NetBeans IDE am using an input stream to read in the source NT file and then using the following line of code to load the NT file into a datasetGraph:
TDBLoader.load(indexingDataset, inputs, true);
I let it run for about 5 hrs now and it still isnt done. Whilst doing this everything on my laptop seems to slow down probably because of it taking all my physical memory space. Is there a faster way to do this???
The documentation says to use tdbloader2 but its only available for linux while am using windows. Would be really helpful if anyone could tel me how to use this tool in windows using cygwin. Please take into consideration I have never really used Cygwin in windows.
The latest release of TDB has two command line utilities for bulk loading: tdbloader and tdbloader2. The first is pure Java and it runs on Windows as well as on any machine with a JVM. The second is a mix of Java and UNIX shell script (in particular it uses UNIX sort). It runs on Linux, I am not sure it runs on Cygwin. I suggest you use tdbloader on a 64-bit machine with as much RAM as you can find. :-)
The latest release of TDB is available here:
http://www.apache.org/dist/incubator/jena/jena-tdb-0.9.0-incubating/jena-tdb-0.9.0-incubating-distribution.zip
The development version of TDB has an additional bulk loader command: tdbloader3. This is a pure Java version of tdbloader2. Instead of using UNIX sort (which works only on text files) we used a pure Java external sort with binary files. For more details on tdbloader3, search for the JENA-117 issue.
You can find a SNAPSHOT of TDB in the Apache snapshots repository, you are warned, that has not been released yet.
For the more adventurous there is also tdbloader4 which is not included in Apache Jena and it is to be considered an experimental prototype.
tdbloader4 builds TDB indexes (i.e. B+Tree indexes) using MapReduce (this is stretching a little bit the MapReduce model, but it works).
You can find tdbloader4 here: https://github.com/castagna/tdbloader4
To conclude, my advise to you, on Windows, is: download the latest official release of TDB and use tdbloader with a 64-bit machine with a lot of RAM. If you do not have one, use an m1.xlarge EC2 instance (i.e. 15 GB of RAM) (or equivalent).
For more help, I invite you to join the official jena-users#incubator.apache.org mailing list where, I am sure, you'll have better and faster support.

how create a virtual drive

Are there any known delphi components or code that creates a simple virtual drive that links to a single file. example ISO file? but this time, can be read and write.
Writing a "virtual drive" requires writing a kernel-level device emulation driver (a "SCSI miniport"-based drivers seem fairly popular), which generally means C/C++ -- and that is just the start ;-)
Not a trivial task. There may be some existing [open source] code solutions that get at least some of the way there...
Here are what I have been able to find with some quick google goggles:
Wikipedia article on ISO software
WinCDEmu
WinCDEmu is an open-source utility for mounting ISO image files in Microsoft Windows. It installs a Windows device driver which allows a user to mount an image of a CD or DVD ROM and access it as if it were a physical drive.
TrueCrypt
Virtual Floppy
However, if all you need is a tool to create an ISO/VHD from a directory and not a real "virtual drive" (or, at least a virtual driver someone else is providing), then that might be a far simpler integration task...
Happy coding.

How can I easily add storage to a VirtualBox machine with XP installed?

When I installed Windows XP on a VirtualBox machine, I made the hard drive only 10 GB since and assumed it would expand in size (as do hard drives in VMWare as far as I can remember, isn't this true?).
In any case, I'm trying to install Visual Studio 2010 beta on this Virtual Box XP image and it has run out of disk space.
Googling for an answer, I'm finding complicated tutorials like this which show you how to increase the size of a VirtualBox hard drive "in just a couple hours".
But I can't imagine it would be that hard to either:
increase the size of a virtual disk (after all, it is virtual)
create a new hard drive of, say, 20 GB and just attach it in the virtual machine as the D: or E: drive
How can I easily add storage space to a VirtualBox machine with XP installed?
I found this nugget at the link following. It worked perfect for me and only took 5 seconds.
As of VirtualBox 4 they added support for expansion.
VBoxManage modifyhd filename.vdi --resize 46080
That will resize a virtual disk image to 45GB.
https://superuser.com/questions/172651/increasing-disk-space-on-virtualbox
Note: This applies to pre-4 VirtualBox. In VB4, HDD expansion has been introduced.
According to the VirtualBox documentation:
When creating an image, its size needs to be specified,
which determines this fixed geometry. It is therefore not possible to change the size of
the virtual hard disk later.
So, the easiest way to add additional space to an existing VM is to attach a second hard disk. Go to the VM Settings > Hard Disks > Add New. Then, click the "Select Hard Drive" button and click on "New". Follow the wizard to create a new virtual hard disk. It will then show up as D: or E: in your guest OS.
For Windows users there's an additional user friendly option: CloneVDI Tool by mpack. It's a GUI front-end to VBoxManage that makes things a little easier to work with.
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=22422
As Alexander M. mentioned, you'll still have to use GParted, Partition Magic or a similar partition editor to grow your partition to the newly allocated physical drive. To do this just download the GParted iso, mount it as a bootable drive in the VirtualBox and boot from it.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php
Newer versions of VirtualBox add an option for VBoxManage clonehd that allows you to clone to an existing (larger) virtual disk.
The process is detailed here: Expanding VirtualBox Dynamic VDIs
Step 1 :
create new virtual disk as per #mhaller instruction
Step 2 :
Open Run dialog box type diskmgmt.msc and enter
Step 3 :
Select uninitialized partition, right click->initialize
Step 4 :
Select the partition again, right click and create extended partition, again right click create logical drive (adjust the partition size if you need in wizard)
Thats all
For windows users:
cd “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox”
VBoxManage modifyhd “C:\Users\Chris\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 7\Windows 7.vdi” --resize 81920
http://www.howtogeek.com/124622/how-to-enlarge-a-virtual-machines-disk-in-virtualbox-or-vmware/
Take a look at CloneVDI from the VirtualBox site... 100% painless!
I am glad you were able to get this done in this manner, but you can (and I did) use the GParted tool for my Windows XP host by following the helpful entry by Eric. To re-iterate/expand on his solution (don't be afraid of the # steps, I'm trying to help newbies here, so there are necessarily more detailed instructions!):
change the size of the virtual hard disk via the VBoxManage modifyhd command, which is well-documented here and in the VirtualBox documentation.
download the GParted-live (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/latest/download?source=dlp) or search the internet for GParted-live ISO. The important part is to get the live (.iso) verison, which is in the form of a bootable .ISO (CD) image.
Mount this new .ISO to the CD virtual drive in the host machine's Storage settings
If necessary/desired, change the boot order in the System settings for the host machine, to boot from CD before Hard Disk (alternatively, you can press F12 when it's booting up, and select the device)
start your VM; if you changed the boot order, it will boot to the GParted-live ISO; otherwise press F12 to do this.
do not be afraid or get too confused/wrapped up in the initial options you are presented; I selected all the defaults (booting to GParted default, default key mapping, language (assuming English - sorry for my non-English friends!), display, etc.). Read it, but just press enter at each prompt. With a Windows VM you should be fine with all the defaults, and if you're not, you're not going to break anything, and the instructions are pretty good about what to do if the defaults don't work.
it will boot to a GUI environment and start the GParted utility. Highlight the c: drive (assuming that's the drive you want to increase the size on) and select resize/move.
change to the new size you want in MB (they abbreviate MiB) - just add the new amount available (represented in the bottom number - MiB following) to the middle number. E.g: I changed mine from like 4000 MiB (e.g., 4GB - my initial size) to 15000 MiB (15 GB) because I'd added 10 GB to my virtual disk. Then click OK.
Click Apply. Once it's done you'll have to reboot - for whatever reason my mouse did not work on the desktop icons on the GUI (I could not click exit) so I just closed the VM window and selected reboot. I did not even have to unmount the ISO, it apparently did it automatically.
Let Windows go through the disk check - remember, you just changed the size outside of Windows, so it has no record of this. This will presumably allow it to update itself with the new info. Once it completes and you log in, you'll likely be told that Windows needs to reboot to use your 'new device' (at least in XP it did for me). Just reboot and you are done!
These steps worked for me to increase the space on my windows VM:
Clone the current VM and select "Full Clone" when prompted:
Resize the VDI:
VBoxManage modifyhd Cloned.vdi --resize 45000
Run your cloned VM, go to Disk Management and extend the volume.
Adding a second drive is probably easiest. That would only take a few minutes, and it wouldn't require any configuration, really.
Alternatively, you could create the second, bigger drive, then run a disk imaging utility to copy all data on disk1 to disk2. That certainly shouldn't take a few hours, but it would take longer than just living with two drives.
i used following instructions, its so easy to increase virtual box disk size
http://blog.bhupen.me/1/post/2011/09/increase-virtualbox-disk-size.html
The problem is that the file system on that disk was created when the disk had a certain geometry and you must modify it (while your OS is running on it).
So yes, making the virtual hard disk bigger is not a big issue. The issue is to make the new space available to your OS. To do that, you need tools like parted (Linux) or Partition Magic (Windows).
Taked from here => forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=41118#p41118
You could try something like this (see also Tutorial - All about VDIs: How can I resize the partitions inside my VDI?):
Create a new VDI of the desired size.
Boot GParted Live in a VM with both old and new VDIs attached.
Check in the partition editor (opened automatically after booting) what your old and new disk locations are. (It'll be something like /dev/hda and /dev/hdb.)
Copy contents from old to new disk. This will take a fair amount of time. (Here /dev/hdX is your original disk and /dev/hdY the new one).
dd if=/dev/hdX of=/dev/hdY
Warning: Make sure you do not mix up your input and output disks or you'll wipe all information from your original disk! (if= specifies the input and of= specifies the output.)
Reboot (again with GParted-Live). Now you should be able to increase the Windows partition size on the new disk.
Once you've verified the larger VDI boots Windows fine (and disk size is as you'd expect) you can of course delete the old smaller VDI.
Edit: Instead of rebooting before you resize the partition you should be able to run partprobe and the hit CTRL+R in GParted instead.
After resizing and not being able to view the resizing on my windows XP guest machine, I had to
clone it
resize it with
"VBoxManage modifyhd winxppro\ Clone.vdi --resize 30720"
and everything worked
I saw in other forums that snapshots can interfere for resizing and not being able to remove all snapshots for different errors I got, the only found solution for me was to clone it to remove the snapshots and then resize it, and everything worked. For resizing outside windows, a gparted boot cd that can be found here can help
If you want to resize a fixed size disk, or want to USE the resized disk
VBoxManage modifyhd filename.vdi --resize 99999
won't work. It supports only dynamic disks. Even for a dynamic disk, you'll have to resize the partitions.
Make a backup copy of your VM.
you have to go to VirtualBox manager, File-VirtualMediaManager.
There copy your virtual disk to another one. Make it dynamic while copying.
Go to your machine, Settings - Storage. Link to the new disk.
Return to VirtualMediaManager. Release the old disk.
NOW make resize with the new disk, as
VBoxManage modifyhd filename.vdi --resize 99999.
Resize partitions on the new disk:
download live Linux or live GParted iso.
In VirtualBox manager - settings - Storage - CD's add this iso.
VirtualBox manager - settings - system set loading from CD
launch VM, launch sudo gparted.
right click swap partition, UNSWAP it.
Move right border of the extended partition with swap up to the right.
Move swap to the right
Move left border of the extended partition up to the right
Move right border of YOUR partition up to the right.
Close VM
Remove CD from VM
check how it works
Close VM
remove the old disk in VirtualMediaManager.
Here you are!

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