Oracle VirtualBox Advanced Features: Storage Networking and Command-Line

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] hello my name is lowell vanderpool and this channel is dedicated to it students i.t professionals and anyone who enjoys learning technical subjects we just finished our demonstration on virtualbox's snapshot and cloning technology and now we want to explore the storage and network technology that are built into oracle's virtualbox hypervisor with just a decent laptop or desktop pc you can use sas controllers nvme controllers and multiple hard disks you can experiment with raid and microsoft storage spaces virtualbox will emulate several popular sas controllers parallel scuzzy controllers sata controllers even an iscsi interface and depending on your guest operating system's drivers you can connect say in windows 11 up to eight devices on some of these controllers windows then and linux can allow you to try out many raid options on virtualbox keep in mind that the best way to learn and get value out of any training including what you get on youtube is to take the time and experiment with the software yourself education research is clear that listening to training you retain about 15 of what you learn but taking that extra step to actually doing what you learned your retention jumps to 80 i encourage anyone serious in it carve out some time and either use hyper-v or oracle's virtualbox to gain that invaluable exposure to hypervisors and all the important technology that you can leverage by using either a type 1 or type 2 hypervisor in addition to storage technologies when we use virtualbox we're also going to look at network topologies that are built in look at some of the practical uses for each of them you can configure many complex network scenarios and learn to configure servers and pcs to work on them and last we're going to look at virtualbox manage.exe which provides a rich command line interface to all of virtualbox's features allow scripting automation to your virtual environment now as we start talking about advanced storage technologies with virtualbox it's humorous to realize that virtualbox does an incredible job of supporting legacy devices legacy ide controllers parallel scuzzy which are all old technology and at first you would think why what what do we care about an ide hard drive well there's still a lot of xp manufacturing equipment there's a lot of medical devices that are still running xp and they are using ide hard drives there are still controllers out there for parallel scuzzy so virtualbox supports that they obviously also support nvme the sas controllers as well as iscsi and sata so although virtualbox is going to provide you these controllers it's up to your guest operating system and its ability to have driver support for that controller that's the big issue drivers are really important for the guest operating system as it will dictate whether you can use a controller or not so here i've got windows 11 beta and you can see beta is having a lot of trouble with nvme controller that i've got installed and my parallel scuzzy controller the rest of them it had driver support now once windows 11 reaches full production this might all clear up so if you're not as familiar with some of the old controllers virtualbox supports a number of the ide controller chipsets we also support the sata the ahci the advanced host controller interface there is the ability to download intel's matrix storage drivers that can be installed in some guest operating systems to make this a little bit more efficient the lsi logic scuzzy parallel controller this works great for windows 2003 and later because it ships with those type drivers there's also a bus logic scuzzy parallel controller works great with nt4o and windows 2000 server those operating systems ship with those type drivers now this is an older lsi scuzzy parallel controller it's a great for older operating systems and you can put up to 15 hard drives on this this is the bus logic scuzzy controller it works for those older operating systems again this will run at least 15 hard drives on this controller now the new lsi logic sas controller which is serial attached scuzzy enables more reliable and faster connections now the controller allows 255 devices but you have to check out your device driver and that will determine how many devices can be connected this does have a six gigabit interface transfer rate newer controllers run at about 12 gigabits per second this is a lsi controller and it has six gigabits of transfer rate and this will support up to four sas hard drives now let's be perfectly clear virtual boxes emulated hardware controllers are no match for a real hardware controller they don't provide any of the things like raid migration raid striping size raid spare disks rebuild times priority settings and all that other capability that's found in hardware controllers i've got a number of videos one i did on hb smart raid i did also another one on maximizing your raid performance and these are all hardware raid controllers what you do get out of a software emulated controller is the ability to put lots of disks on a troller allowing you to take advantage of a lot of software rate microsoft support software rate linux support software rate there are third party software raid products that are just amazing you still want to take time and learn hardware storage controllers but right now this gives you a place to start with at least exploring lots of software raid options here's an example of driver issues this is a windows 11 beta and i've added my lsi adapter sas controller and the driver that installed gave me at least eight ports so i can put up to eight hard drives on this controller they do have an nvme controller just be aware that it's part of the extension pack for oracle box you have to add it in addition to oracle box you can boot drives using nvme only if you're using the the uefi bias configuration up to 255 devices can be connected if the operating system supports it now virtualbox also supports usb support floppy driver support so if you have an operating system that needs a floppy disk then you also have iscsi but it is strictly command line and you can use your vbox.exe to configure an iscsi connection so i'm going to show you what i've done already in windows 11 and then i'll take you step by step in server 2022 so you can see i'm looking at my windows 11 vm i'm going to go to settings and go to storage now i'm actually booting windows 11 off the sata controller you can see my vdi here and this is actually my hard drive representing windows 11. then i added a number of controllers i added an nvme i had to add the extension pack first to my oracle box then i also added a lsi logic 2 which is a old parallel scuzzy controller and we'll see how windows 11 likes that and then i added of course the lsi logic sas controller these are all emulated and i've added three hard drives to that now this is windows 11 beta so there we can't judge windows 11 by beta so it could a lot of this could be fixed in a full production version of windows 11. so let's first look at device manager and you can see my adapter this is my sas controller i also have microsoft storage spaces running right now which gives us an emulated storage controller very interesting a simulated storage controller running on top of emulated storage controllers how about that then i've got the nvme express controller but notice the driver it doesn't like something i might be able to use intel's nvme software that might fix it i haven't tried it and then i've got this scuzzy controller the old parallel scuzzy controller and windows 11 doesn't have the driver for that i've checked updates it still didn't have it but the sas is working and that's fine what i've done with my three hard drives is i've actually enabled storage spaces so i've got a two-way mirror a drive e and i'm using three of those discs to make this storage space drive this is cool and this is what you really want to be able to do with virtualbox is really get in here and explore you can wipe this out start all over again and try different types of storage space configurations there's a number you can add more hard drives up to eight so you can do just about any configuration and storage spaces using this as controller very nice now as i turn to my server i notice that it is froze and here's an opportunity to show you how to leverage the bottom of the oracle boxes icons to help me indicate what's going on if you notice this icon indicates disk activity i don't see a light flashing that tells me there's no hard drive activity that's not good a server with no hard drive activity i can see some lights flashing on the network icon which means network data is flowing in and out that's interesting but no disk activity so i don't know what's going on here but i have no control i can't send a control i'll delete to it so it looks like i'm going to have to jerk the plug on this server before i shut down the server i pulled up session information on this server that appears to be locked up and i do see good things i do see a cpu load ram usage network data moving in and out that at least indicates processes and the kernel are functioning may need to just cool my jets and let this server finish maybe the updates are tying up the system and i need to just relax chill and let this thing do its thing so i eventually did have to pull the plug on this server 2022 so we're back in form here let's go look at our settings for this server and we'll pull up our hardware settings and go to storage and so you can see i've just got a sata controller in this server which is very rare you don't usually use sata in a server usually it's going to be sas and i've got one vdi that basically is the server 2022 hard drive so to change the server i'm going to go ahead and shut down because we have to be in a shutdown state to add controller so we're going to go ahead and shut down and let's go into our settings and let's add a sas controller so i'm going to go to storage here you can see we can add new storage controller so i'm just going to slide down here and get the lsi logic sas controller now we have a sas controller hopefully server 2022 will automatically add a driver we could boot it up to see but i feel confident that it does let's go ahead and add some hard drives to it if you look at our controller you'll see two icons one's a cd-rom or cd icon the other one is a hard drive icon so if i wanted to add a dvd or some some optical device i could just click that and i would add that but over here we see a little hard drive and it's going to allow me to add hard drives so i'm going to create some new ones so i'm going to say create and i'm going to use the vdi the the default file format that is used by oracle box for hard drives go next we're going to use a dynamically allocated and we'll just use 50 gigs that's fine and i want to make sure it's in the right place so remember make sure your files are in the right place and this is in the right location so i'm going to say create and it's going to add another hard drive so notice in this graphical user interface it shows me a bunch of hard drives that are attached to various virtual boxes in my my virtualbox manager but this one right here it says not attached it's not attached to anything it's just the one that i just created highlight that one that is not attached and say okay and notice it put it right on that controller so let's add another one we can do this all day we'll create another hard drive another vdi another dynamic 50 gigs is fine and we'll go ahead and slide down here to what is not attached notice it uses the same name and adds a variable one two and we'll just keep doing this i'm gonna add another hard drive it's that easy to add hard drives very nice keep going and now we have dot 2.3 we'll go ahead and choose that one [Music] okay we've added eight hard drives to my sas controller we've got to first boot up windows 2022 to see what kind of driver it will install and if it will give me eight ports i'm hoping it will and then we can start having fun so let's go ahead and boot up our server start i'm gonna go ahead and log on so we'll watch our server so i've opened up device manager and it did install a driver for the 3000 series sas controller 8 port so we're good so now i've launched disk management and let's take a look and see what we have here we've got disc one that's a 50 gig we've got a lot of 50 gigs here all of them are showing up what we need to do now is get them all initiated get them on our system so then we can play with them in terms of raid so i'll do one let's go do here let's get it online initialize the disk we'll do disk one let's do gpt so i spared you the pain of watching me do all of this so i went ahead and finished all of our discs i used gpt and i realized now if i'm going to use some of the old ray technology built into windows not storage spaces but the old type of raid i really need to convert these all into dynamic so i'm going to go ahead and convert them to dynamic i'm going to leave disk 0 my boot disk alone but i'm going to go ahead and check all these boxes and i'm going to convert all these to dynamic because then i can play with microsoft's built-in raid so we'll go ahead and do that now you can see my disks are no longer basic but they're dynamic now i can do all kinds of things mirror new mirrored volume new stripe volume new span volume new raid 5. how about that so let's go and now i can choose i can add disk 2 3 4 5 6 seven eight if i want to do it that way go ahead and go next and i can assign a drive letter if i want let's go next we'll just do d ntfs call this raid5 give it a volume name we'll perform a quick format and say next and say okay and now just that quick i've built an eight disk raid 5 array on server 2022 you could see my light blue color at the top of each of the drives indicating it's a raid 5 volume that's just one thing that we could do real quick with a sas emulated controller a few hard disks and you can start playing with raid 5. we're going to explore now virtualbox networking virtualbox can supply to a vm up to eight virtual network adapters four can be configured via the gui the others have to be configured via the command line or vboxmanage.exe it supports up to six different nics it does support jumbo frames and that is ethernet frames larger than 1500 bytes these are the network cards that it supports it does support para virtualization network adapters and they give you the best performance but you do have to do some extra work to use them if you're trying to squeeze the most out of your network you're going to have to use your pair virtualized network cards but the guest operating system must provide a special software interface this avoids complex emulation of network hardware and pretty much improves your network performance the open source project that is supporting this type of driver is kvm it's a kernel-based virtual machine open source full virtualization solution for linux but they also supply these drivers so you can get windows 64-bit drivers but you do have to sign them yourself let's take a quick look at virtualbox network modes so this is my video server and i realize it's busy but if you look at device manager and look at my network adapters i want you to focus on this one this is my real genuine wired one gigabit network jack on the back of my motherboard i have another real one real tech 2.5 gigabit network jack on my motherboard and then i have a usb wireless so i really only have three network connections on this particular motherboard so when i installed oracle virtualbox it installed a virtualized ethernet adapter for my gigabit intel and a ethernet virtualized adapter for my 2.5 it really doesn't mess with the wireless you can but right now it definitely makes a virtualized host nic for each of the wired jacks that i have on the motherboard you can see hyper-v goes crazy we'll get into that in other lectures but that's what oracle box does when it installs now why is this important because as we get into some of the virtualbox network types we're going to take advantage of those virtualbox host adapters now virtualbox supports a number of network nodes notice in the graphic we've got every adapter you can assign a different network mode each of these are complex so let's take a look at each and every one of these network modes the first choice is you've just not plugged in the cable pretty straightforward you have the nat mode which is the default but you can change it then we have nat network which is very similar to what you have with your isp at home then we have the bridge adapter we have an internal network type which is a completely isolated network you can build host only adapter type and then the generic driver keep in mind the three network modes that are in red give you the best performance so this chart kind of gives us a quick overview of these network modes if you look on the left hand side you have the different network modes on the top the communication on the furthest left column you have vmdvm communication vm to host communication host to vm communication and as you can see etc so you can look at each of these and see exactly the impact as you choose each network mode how that's going to impact the different types of communication so what are the practical uses for this kind of advanced network well one you can create lots of multiple nics and you can play with that kind of environment having four network cards nick teaming if you get into windows server you can actually take advantage of nick teaming you can look at servers connected to multiple subnets you can do nat and port forwarding lab work you can build a lab network totally isolated from a production network you can build a backup network versus your production network and you can do bridging so let me throw my two cents in here having taught thousands of students i saw the large majority of them struggle mastering advanced networking it's a tough subject including their instructor i had to work really hard to gain an understanding of networking it's not an easy topic now there are always people that pick it up with ease that's fine that's great but most of you are going to have to work really really hard to get a good understanding of networking and especially advanced networking but do it networking is the key to everything in it so put the time the effort it does pay off in the long run the first network type we're going to look at is nat it's simple it gives you very high isolation from external devices to your guest operating system so network address translation or the nat mode is the simplest way of accessing the external network from a virtual machine it provides the best isolation from external devices if you plan on using just one virtual machine or two virtual machines you can put them on that they're fine if you're using your virtual machine to connect to a malware site or a suspect http url then you definitely want to be nat now in this slide deck i have some great diagrams if you're new to networking or still struggling with learning networking stop and take your time to download these slide decks our notes and study these network diagrams they really do help you start to understand and grasp subnetting network structures and topologies so this network mode notice every single client gets its own nat router so they have their own gateway notice they all have the exact same ip address because they're completely isolated from each other this is the default you don't have to do it this way there are other choices now the next networking mode is called nat networking it's different than nat nat networking is a different type of net it's just like your home you've got a router you have a main central nat device and a firewall and a router and everybody else is behind that device it gives you a good isolation it's not good if you're trying to host servers on virtualbox because then you have to port forward to get through them now nat networking basically allows the virtualbox to act as a dhcp server you get a nat engine that translates private ip addresses to public if that's the case the internet sees your virtualbox as the origination of traffic no configuration is needed on host or guest it's great for guest os's that are clients it's not good for a server environment here's a network diagram of nat networking mode you'll see that you only have one router one gateway one that device for all the virtual machines that you have hosted keep in mind the ip addresses that are assigned are assigned by default you can change all of this right now you can see you get 10 dot numbers which are the class a private ip addresses but all these ip addresses you can change but you have to use vbox manage.exe which is the command line interface now i deliberately added different pictorials of the same exact network diagram so in the slide deck if you look you'll see more than one pictorial diagram of the same topology sometimes that's really helpful just seeing it a different way from a different perspective helps in understanding here's another pictorial diagram of that same topology so i encourage you if you're starting to grasp these concepts look at all these diagrams now anytime you use a nat or nat networking if you want to access those guest operating systems you're going to have to do port forwarding now your bridge networking mode allows you to bring a network switch into the whole network there's no more isolation no protection you're you're wide open everything that you have on your virtual box hanging off your virtualbox and everything on your local area network is visible to each other this is great if you're hosting servers and you want everyone to see them this is really good for production environments remember in bridging wireless nicks do not work well with bridging so just be aware if you're dealing with a wireless nic you're probably going to have a hard time getting into the bridge mode here's a basic pictorial of the topology of bridge mode remember everybody sees everybody because we put switches in there's no more nat boxes there's no more anything to isolate everybody sees everybody this is another pictorial of the same topology bridge networking this is another pictorial of this same bridge topology very helpful when you're as you're trying to master these concepts now another network type is called internal network type and it gives you the ability to build an entire network but with complete isolation from the production network in an internal network type all the guests can see each other hosts cannot see the internal network even the host is isolated network configuration is needed this is great for multi-tier solutions and anytime you want to do a isolated lab environment completely isolated from your production environment so here's a great pictorial of the internal network type you can see all the guests can see each other there's no problem with them communicating and talking but notice they cannot talk to the external network not even to the host here's another view of that same topology here's a different view of that same topology one of the nice things about the internal network type is it's got some real practical uses let's say i want to build at home a entire active directory network i could build domain controllers all the things to build an active directory environment and never impact my home network another network type is host only network type again complete isolation from external devices but guests can see the host what if i want to build an environment where i've got a powerful sql database and i've got a bunch of guest accounts so that i can connect to that sql database and really try out programming load balance just all kinds of things now sql databases are pretty heavy duties your host would be an ideal place to put it and your clients could then access it so host only network type really lends itself to that kind of an application here's a network diagram of the host only network mode here's a slightly different diagram of that same host only network type here's a different view of that same topology i'm always amazed at some of the so cool things that virtualbox has just kind of stuck in there this one is so cool this is udp tunneling network where they are using some really cool tricks so if i had a workstation somewhere on the internet and i've got one on my home network i can actually build a tunnel from one virtual box across the globe to another virtualbox this is really cool now virtualbox has a rich command line interface in fact you can do just about everything with virtualbox at a command prompt you use the vboxmanage.exe and it provides you arguments switches parameters for just about everything that we've ever talked about in virtualbox in this series and much much more there's extensive documentation on all of this command line interface once you've installed virtualbox you point your command line prompt to program files oracle virtualbox and then type vbox manage you're ready to go [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

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Length: 29min 15sec (1755 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021