Some questions about VirtualBox

[woodwalker]

I have some questions about VirtualBox.

If I create a virtual machine, is it sandboxed from the host machine? That is, if I get a virus on my VM, is the host machine safe? Also, along those lines, can I allocate 90% of my harddrive and RAM and use the VM as my normal machine? Can files downloaded in the VM be transferred to an external drive and used in the host machine? Can I boot the VM's OS in safe mode? And can I use Clonezilla to install the OS?

I hope that someone can answer these questions, or at least point me to the best place to get them answered.

 

[viranimus]

I have some questions about VirtualBox.

If I create a virtual machine, is it sandboxed from the host machine? That is, if I get a virus on my VM, is the host machine safe? Also, along those lines, can I allocate 90% of my harddrive and RAM and use the VM as my normal machine? Can files downloaded in the VM be transferred to an external drive and used in the host machine? Can I boot the VM's OS in safe mode? And can I use Clonezilla to install the OS?

I hope that someone can answer these questions, or at least point me to the best place to get them answered.

Ok Lot of questions. Ill try to offer what I can, though it WILL be out of order.

First off. Do NOT make the mistake of making a static allocation of hard drive size. If your needs change and you need more hard drive space it becomes a serious PITA to reallocate drive size. Make it dynamically tied to your physical drive.

Secondly. Connecting USB drives can be done, but again this is a PITA function because your USB drives will automatically want to identify to your host machine first. What ends up being MUCH easier is to make a transition folder to your host drive. That way its simply a drag and drop migration from point A to point B.

Not familiar with Clonezilla so Cant weigh in on this one.

Now as for Ram. No, I would not allocate 90% to virtualized system. Remember the host needs ram to work with to make Virtual box work. Also remember, that if your remote OS is a 32 bit OS it can still only utilize 3.5-4 gb of ram anyway, plus only like 128 mb of Video card ram.

Now.. the last but most important part. Yes VMboxing IS sandboxing and it does protect because much like reformatting a PC you can hypothetically reformat VM infinitely easier. Plus if you run VM for Linux you have even greater surfing protection because of base language and repositories not being present on top of being able to kill and restore if need be.

You should be able to boot in safe mode depending on if the base OS has a safe mode to boot into, though its really rather pointless to do so provided you take relatively frequent save states, its easier to revert to an earlier state should something go wrong.

ANyway, thats the best I can offer. Currently I use two sessions of VM running Linux Mint each under a host of Win7 and It makes for an incredibly secure and stable configuration I wish I could have been doing this a decade ago. Best of luck to you.

 

[woodwalker]

Thank you very much, viranimus. My reasoning for allocating so much of my HD and RAM was that I no plans to actually use my host machine, and from what I hear, the dynamic feature is bad for overhead. This was taking into account allocating a good deal of RAM, so that the host would have less RAM to use, but I did not make it clear that the figure "90%" was a hypothetical figure that I have yet to figure out, though it will be more than 60%.

I would like to say that I for some reason thought when I created this thread that no one would actually respond, but I guess that was dumb of me, considering that this is a website frequented by nerds, and only nerds (no offense to anyone meant, I proudly put myself in that category as well).

But, at any rate, thank you for your very helpful post; you have answered my questions as well as anyone, and there is no need to reply, I think that we can let this thread die at this point.

 

[DoPo]

viranimus said everything I wanted to say, I just want to add something - if you're really going to use your virtual OS as your main OS (I can see this as a reason behind giving it the majority of system resources) - don't. You're turning your PC into a dated bunch of hardware by basically discarding some of the extra computing power you have. That's not only the 10% hard disk space and the 10% (or 40%) RAM - a VM runs generally slower due to having to translate the instructions to the CPU.

If you want to get the benefits of a VM with less of the drawbacks, I'd suggest either bying a metric fuckton of RAM (represented here as 8GB minimum and the more the better) so you'll never starve the OS/VirtualOS or, alternatively, wipe your machine and install a hypervisor (slightly fancier VM software), such as XenServer, which would manage your VMs while using a minimum amount of resources. The hypervisor option is really better. It is essentially a minimal OS that runs your guest OS inside. You don't get the big resource overhead of essentially running two full operating systems (not even counting the extra software and services).