In my last virtualization article Streamlined Software Development with Virtualization I discussed about benefits of virtualization and virtual machines on software development process. In this article I present how to set up an excellent free PC virtualization software VMware server to Windows XP host computer and how to install Windows XP client system on it.

Setting up VMware Server

VMware Server is an excellent virtualization software for software development. It’s feature rich, easy to set up and completely free. VMware targets VMware Server for light duty server virtualization and targets non-free VMware Workstation for software developers. VMware Workstation should have some extra features but unless you really need these extra features there is not any need to pay for them.

VMware Server can be downloaded from product homepage. To install the product, you’ll need to gain serial numbers. The serial numbers can be requested from VMware for free by filling-up registration form. Installation of VMware is very straight forward. If you don’t have Microsoft web server IIS installed on your computer, the installer will complain of the lack of IIS. The IIS is only needed if you want to manage your virtual machines over the network and for local only installation you can safely ignore this complain and press Ok to continue.

Creating A New Virtual Machine

After you have installed VMware Server you need to create a new virtual machine. Virtual machine runs on top of host operating system. It uses a large file as file system image, shares the host computer keyboard, mouse, monitor and network connection. To create a new Windows XP virtual machine you’ll need a Windows XP installation CD and a Windows XP license.

Start VMware Server. From an appearing pop-up window select local host to indicate VMware Server that you want to manage the virtual machines on your local computer and not machines on the network. From File menu select New > Virtual Machine. A wizard will start that guides you trough the virtual machine set-up process. After few initial options the first real decision you need to make is to choose the network connection type. Bridged networking is probably the best choice. If you are in a network where each computer needs to be registered for the network, then NAT networking will be easier as you don’t need to register your virtual machine to the network.

The second important choice is selecting the disk capacity. Set the capacity as high as you think you ever may need in this virtual machine, the capacity cannot be increased later on. Uncheck Allocate all disk space now option to keep disk usage at minimum. The disk will be allocated as needed. Finally click Finish button. The virtual machine will be created.

After you have created your new virtual machine you still have to specify the resources it may consume. Click your virtual machine on the inventory unless it is already selected. On the right-hand pane of the VMware Server Window under Commands bar you should have an option link Edit virtual machine settings. Press this link to open the virtual machine settings window.

On the Hardware tab set memory to 512MB if you have 1GB or more of system memory to guarantee Windows XP to run smoothly on the virtual machine. Then click on the CD-ROM settings and turn on the Connect at power on option. This makes your CD/DVD-drive automatically visible to the virtual machine. You need your CD/DVD to be visible so that you can install operating system and software to the virtual machine.

Now we are ready with setting up VMware Server itself. Let’s continue to installing the operating system.

Installing Windows XP on Virtual Machine

Installing windows XP to virtual machine doesn’t much differ from installing Windows to any other computer. Insert the Windows XP installation CD to the CD-ROM drive of your computer. Make sure you have a valid license with a Windows XP serial available. If you have autorun enabled on your host computer, ignore the window that will pop-up.

Make sure you have selected the correct virtual machine from the inventory on VMware Server control panel. Now start your virtual machine by pressing the Start this virtual machine link on the VMware Server control panel. The Virtual Machine should now start up, then connect to your host computer CD-ROM drive and start the Windows XP installer on the CD. From now on the Windows XP installation will proceed as normally.

Installing VMware Tools

After Windows XP installation has finished, there is still one more task to do before you can start using your virtual machine as normally. The virtual machine runs on top of the host computer and the performance is not optimal. All the graphics, mouse movements and key presses are transferred between the host computer and the virtual machine. VMware Tools is a package that should be installed on the newly created virtual machine to improve the performance of the host computer - virtual machine link.

On Windows virtual machines the installation of VMware Tools is very straight forward. On linux virtual machines you will need to recompile your kernel. When virtual machine is turned on and you have logged into it with administrator privileges, select Install VMware Tools from VM menu of the VMware Server control window. This will mount a virtual CD image and if autorun is turned on, an VMware Tools installer will automatically start. If autorun is not turned on, you’ll need to start the installer manually from the CD-ROM drive of your virtual machine.

Conclusions

Congratulations, you’ve now installed VMware Server on Windows XP and installed another installation of Windows XP on the virtual machine. To install applications to virtual machine, simply insert installer CD:s to your host computer CD-ROM drive and you can directly access them from your virtual machine. You can mount CD-ROM images on your host computer to your virtual machine.

It wasn’t that difficult, was it? If you are interested in getting some deeper knowledge on any aspects of virtual machines, please let me know. I can consider writing further articles on using virtual machines on software development.

Would you like to test your software on multiple different operating systems? Do you have multiple development branches of your software you would like to isolate on separate computers to avoid unwanted interactions? Is the software you are developing a client-server system that requires multiple computers to run? Do you need to debug your crashing software?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, virtualized development environment may be the solution to your challenges. Virtualization is currently a hot topic in IT-industry. The word virtualization has multiple meanings and the most common meaning is running multiple operating systems simultaneously on one physical computer by virtualizing the hardware layer. Practically this means that you can run multiple operating system installations in parallel on your computer.

There are a few ways to implement virtualization. One way is to run a virtualization software such as VMWare Server (Windows, Linux), VMWare Workstation (Windows, Linux), VMWare Fusion (OS X), Parallels (OS X), Xen (Linux) or XenSource (Linux) on top of the currently installed operating system or host operating system (the supported host operating systems are in parenthesis). These virtualization systems then allow setting up multiple operating system installations of top the host operating system. The operating systems run as if they were installed on bare metal but they are really running on top of virtual hardware environment provided by the virtualization software. Click the image below to see what it looks like to run LabVIEW on virtual Fedora Core 6 linux on VMWare Server on Windows XP host operating system.

Virtual hardware environment

The isolated virtual computers are called virtual machines. From the operating system point of view virtual machines are exactly like real computers. They provide a processor, memory, hard drive, network interface, a monitor, a CD/DVD-drive, mouse, keyboard and may even support some USB-devices. The user of the virtualization software may define how much system resources such as memory and hard drive space each virtual machine may consume. The user may start and stop virtual machines by pressing start and stop buttons.

The virtual hard drive of each virtual machine is really a large file in the host operating system. The file may either be of a fixed size or gradually resizing up to some upper limit specified by the user. The memory is shared with the host operating system but the user may specify how much memory the virtual machine may consume. The host CD/DVD drive can be used with the virtual machines or alternatively a CD/DVD image can be mounted as a virtual CD/DVD drive. The host mouse and keyboard can be used to control the virtual machines. The virtual machine monitor is a window on the host operating system desktop.

The benefits of virtualization in software development

As indicated by the question in the beginning of the article there are multiple ways virtualization can benefit in the software development process. Virtualization allows isolating multiple software development environments on a same physical computer so that each branch is totally unaware of the other brances and cannot have any interactions with one another. This is a nice thing when you want to develop multiple different versions of the same software and don’t want the development of the different versions to interact and to cause problems in this way. You may also want to test your software with multiple different version of your development tool such as LabVIEW and keep all different version of the development tools isolated from one another. The ability to set multiple isolated development environments on a single computers makes the development process easier and saves your money and nerves.

Another issue where virtualization is a great benefit is when you want to test your software on different operating systems or different versions of the same operating system. Virtualization software allows you to set up multiple different operating systems on a single computer and run them all in parallel. Consider for example that you are developing a LabVIEW application and want to test that it runs properly on Windows XP, Windows Vista, different versions of Linux and OS X. With virtualization software you can run all these operating systems on one computer, although running OS X requires this computer to be a Mac.

Third benefit is when you develop a networked application and need to have multiple computers set up to run the application. Instead of really setting up multiple physical computers you may set up multiple virtual machines that run the different components of the software and interact with one another via the network.

A fourth task where virtual machines show their power is debugging your software. Virtualization technology allows you to make snapshots of your entire virtual machine. The snapshot stores the state of the virtual machine including the memory state and hard disk state to a file. Later you can roll back to this snapshot and repeat what ever you were doing. This is a nice tool when you are for example dubugging a crash. It allows you to roll back to the moment just before the crash and see what really was going on when the crash happened.

Conclusions

Virtualization and virtual machines are a great tool for software development. In this article I covered some general benefits of virtualization in the software development process. I’ll write a follow-up article where I talk about setting up a superb free virtualization software, VMWare Server for Windows. Subscribe to the feed not to miss the next article.

I’d also like to cover LabVIEW licensing issues related to running LabVIEW in virtual machines. I’ve emailed twice National Instruments media relations within the last month telling them that I’m writing an article on LabVIEW virtualization and asking them to comment LabVIEW licensing under virtual machines but they don’t seem to bother responding me. I guess blogging is still not considered a real media.