First Lab -14072009-

Today's lab is an intoduction to virtualization and VMware. Virtulaization has become increasingly important nowadays as virtualization presents a huge opportunity for IT groups to more effectively manage their environments, optimize resource loads for the physical machines at their disposal and even get by with less hardware. Besides, virtualization enables a much higher degree of portability and flexibility. Software is added to an execution platform to produce virtualization to give it the appearance of a different platform. Virtualization supports an operating system, instruction set, and computational resources which differ from those available on the underlying software. One of virtualization environment created by such software is called virtual machine.

Virtual machine (VM) is an environment, usually a program or operating system, which does not physically exist but is created within another environment. It is a software implementation of a machine (computer) that executes programs like a real machine. Virtual machines are often created to execute an instruction set different than that of the host environment. One host environment can often run multiple VMs at once.

In this lab, we are taught to use VMware. First of all, the installation of VMware into operating system is necessary. During the configuration of the virtual machine, we are asked to select a guest operating system which is Microsoft Windows as our task is to  install Windows Server 2003 into the virtual machine. Then, we are asked to check our computer's disk capacity whether its enough 15GB to utilize the virtual machine. 

After that, we start our virtual machine by clicking the green triangle button on the toolbar. Then, installation of Windows Server 2003 is started. It takes about half an hour to complete the installation progress. After the installation is succeeded, we can start explore the Windows Server 2003. A note that must be always remembered is to type CTRL+ALT to get the mouse cursor back to host desktop when we wanted to quit from the virtual machine.