[NCARC] virtual operating system/s

[Bob Slovick]

Kerry, (In the interest of full disclosure, I have worked for VMware in a technical role since 2003).  With VMware Workstation, you can also use a USB device as a “raw device”, so files can be directly accessed by either the VM (Guest OS or GOS) or your physical computer (Host OS).   

You can also “suspend” the VM, or create a Point-in-Time (PiT), image, so if you want to make a bunch of changes, you can take multiple  “snapshots” at different points in the change process, and then “throw it back in time” and revert to a prior known good state.   

Unlike MSFT “System Restore”, that only reverts some changes, as Snapshots are done at a disk block level, it is absolute, and works with any supported GOS.    

I have a few distro's of Linux (Ubuntu, Kali, RHEL etc), thin-provisioned on a high-performance portable SSD, and can run which ever I want, on any computer I want without worrying about drive formats, boot managers, MBRs etc.

As, for the most part, since the only thing the GOS knows about the real HW is the CPU, and the rest of the HW the VM thinks it sees is all “Virtual hardware”, it doesn’t burp as long as the computer you are running it on has the same family of processors as when you created it, even if the rest of the phy hardware is very different, and can change how much memory or how many CPU cores the VM can use, add virtual NICs etc etc...

Hope that helps…

Bob Slovick - AD0HI




 
> On Jun 5, 2017, at 12:21 PM, Jeremy Turner <jeremy at jeremymturner.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Kerry, 
> 
> Typically, the hypervisor (VMWare, VirtualBox, Parallels, etc) will use your virtual hard disk as a local file in the host OS. You can split it up into multiple files if you want a virtual hard drive that is large. Also, you can thinly provision, which means you tell the guest OS that you have a 40 GB virtual hard drive, but it will only use 20 GB on the host system if that's all you are using. It will automatically grow until you hit 40 GB. 
> 
> If you need to increase from 40 GB to 60 GB, the hypervisor software will provide a way to grow the hard drive. You might need to configure the guest OS to see the new space.
> 
> Hope that helps,
> 
> Jeremy / KO6RM 
> 
>> On Jun 5, 2017, at 11:41, Kerry Miller <n0wiq at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello Group,
>> 
>> I am pondering the installation of a virtual operating system and my question is:  How do you manage the mass storage in the computer.
>> 
>> -- 
>> 
>> Kerry N0WIQ
>> 
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