There are lots of operating system virtualization, you have the option to use an open source or a proprietary software depending on your needs,familiarization and most significantly, budget. People have several reasons why they use virtualization, and the most common is for testing purposes wherein they can test different configurations from different OS. Another reason is to security and consolidation, where they can save money and electricity.
Some of the popular open source linux virtualization softwares are OpenVZ, Xen, KVM and VirtualBox. You can also try proprietary softwares such as VMWare and Citrix XenServer, a commercial implementation of Xen.
For this tutorial, I’ll be covering Qemu, another virtualization program and here are the steps:
Prerequisites and componets:
a. windows installation in ISO format ex. WinXP ( you can create ISO format using 3rd party programs like magic ISO, power ISO etc.)
b.process emulator (QEMU)
c. any Linux distribution (I’ll be using CentOS 5 for this demonstration)
d. Linux/Unix administration skills
A. Installing qemu
# yum install qemu
# qemu-img create winxp.img 4G
C. install the windows
#qemu -hda winxp.img -cdrom win.iso -m 256 -boot d
B. Create windows image by creating a virtual drive ( sample demo is creation of 4 GB virtual drive named winxp.img)
this will tell qemu to use the virtual disk as the hard disk, which drive to use as the cdrom and to allocate 256 memory for the virtual pc
Qemu will boot up and you will be in windows install (line the normal windows installation)
Tips: CTRL+ALT= when you need your mouse
ALT+CTRL+F = toggle fullscreen
After finished the windows installation, you can just close the Qemu Window
D. Testing the newly installed windows under Linux
#qemu -hda winxp.img -m 256 -boot c
NOTE: This procedure is being done in your Linux X environment e.g. GNOME , KDE etc.
CHALLENGE: How to emulate Windows in Linux OS when you only have ssh access to the remote server, no X or GUI?
SOLUTION: Create a windows image in your local test machine then upload the image file.
Tip: Since an image file will be 4GB in size, you can split the file into several pieces via your favorite archiver. I used Winrar for this one, then upload those files in queue ( Bandwidth matters)
* Since image is already uploaded on the server, the only thing to do is to emulate and redir port 3389 for RDP purposes.
sample:
# qemu -hda /home/test/winxp.img -m 2000 -boot c -redir tcp:3389::3389 -nographic
You can now access your windows via RDP… Start> Run..> mstsc
then input the server IP address
