Building a Virtual Machine (VM) inside your existing OS! a.k.a. OS in OS

Virtual Machine as its name, implies a virtual machine inside a real, existing machine. In this post lets look into why use virtual machine and how to do it with Virtual Box. It is like running another OS (either same or different) as a software in an OS itself without the need to reboot. Some common examples are running Windows inside of a Mac or running linux distributions in either Macintosh or Windows.

So, first of all why should one need another virtual machine since there is an existing machine? Here is a list I made myself:

1. First of all, people (at least some sohai like me) enjoys doing it.
2. Can try out different OS without taking the risk to screw up your whole system.
3. Better security, not scare of viruses anymore. (As you can delete the whole virtual machine once it got infections)
4. Able to run some software which isn't meant for some particular platform. (A lame example would be running PPStream through a virtual machine in Macintosh since Mac doesn't has its version of PPStream)

Most probably there will be a ton more of the benefits of Virtual Machines out there so just discover those yourself! Now we shall go into how to actually build one by yourself. There are a few software in the market which provide this awesome feature like VMware, Parallel Desktops and Virtualbox. Today we gonna take a quick look on how we build a virtual machine by using the freeware Virtualbox instead of the other two which will cost you quite a lot of money.

What you will need to build a VM:

• Virtualbox software which you can get it here.
• An existing OS for sure (in my case Windows 7 Ultimate)
• Another OS's DVD or disc image (iso file).

Here is the super simple guide to build a virtual machine by using Virtualbox:

1. Of course, install Virtualbox and launch it.
2. Click "New" and give a name to the OS and chose the type of OS you are going to install in the virtual machine. In my case, I am going to install Elementary OS which is a Ubuntu 10.10 variant distro and you can get its iso here. Then click "Next"
3. Then allocate the amount of RAM you wish to allocate for this virtual machine. Usually the amount it recommend should be sufficient. Then click "Next"
4. The next step is to create a virtual hard disk for the virtual machine. Chose create a new hard disk and click "Next". This will bring out another windows, chose fixed size storage for better performance or chose dynamically expanding storage if your hard disk space is scarce. Again, the disk space it recommend you should be more than enough since you are not going to store your media in the virtual machine (hope so). Click "Finish" and wait for the virtual disk to be created (this may take some time).
5. Click "Finish" again and a blank virtual machine is now created.
6. Chose the VM you have just created and click "Setting" on above, go to "Storage" tab and click on the cd icon under attribute and mount the ISO file for the virtual machine OS then click "Ok".
7. Now double click the virtual machine you have just created and here it goes! The virtual machine will now boot with the iso file mounted and you just have to install the OS of the choice as in usual way.
8. After the installation finish click "Devices" on the virtual machine window and unmount the iso file and then click "Machine"then "Reset" to reboot the virtual machine.
9. Now the virtual machine will be ready for use!

A simple video tutorial (watch it in 720p full screen) :

Similar way can be used to make a Hackintosh virtual machine with a few more tweaks too!

*This is just a brief guide though, if there is any problem feel free to Google it yourself or post a comment here in this blog post. Cheers :)