Over the years as an IT professional I have had many situations when having Linux available has been extremely helpful. Things from password decryption on windows hosts when someone accidental changed the password on the only account, or needing to do vulnerability testing has been made easier by using Linux. But having to either have a dedicated machine or a machine dual booted makes it difficult when you have limited assets.
So a simple solution to this problem is to use a host based virtualization application like virtual box. Essentially what virtual box allows you to do is run an operating system from within an operating system. Both operating systems share the host pc hardware and can see each other while running.
As there is a ton a different Linux distribution’s out there I have decided to use Kubuntu. Kubuntu uses KDE 4.3 as its desktop manager which is very similar to windows so the learning curve should not be as high as trying to use GNOME (another desktop manager).
What we are going to use to make all this happen is the free open source virtualization package called virtual box which we can get from here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. Virtual box will allow you to install many guest operating systems including emulating 64 bit hardware. This is very handy when your host pc is running on 32 bit hardware as some operating systems will require you to have 64 bit hardware (IE: Windows Server 2008 R2 which I will cover in a different guide).
After you download virtual box it is a fairly straightforward installation which at the end it will launch and you will be presented with the following screen: (Please note you will lose your network connection during the install as virtual box installs some additional network drivers.)
From here you can manage your vm’s as needed which include creating, deleting, and other things we will cover a little more as we create our vm.
So to create a vm you would click the new button which will launch the wizard. Using the wizard you will be asked questions like the name of the vm and the operating system as seen here:
From here you would click the pull down buttons and select Linux for the operating system and Ubuntu Linux for the version (Kubuntu is a KDE version of Ubuntu). When you’re done it should look like this:
