[dba-Tech] VirtualBox Questions

Arthur Fuller fuller.artful at gmail.com
Sat Sep 19 18:26:26 CDT 2009


I run Sun's VirtualBox on my AMD-64 bit box with an NVidia video driver and
a 22" Acer monitor and 4GB of RAM. For the most part, I love what I am
getting, but there is one funny thing that puzzles me. I have several
virtual machines installed: Ubuntu Linux, and two different instances of
winXP, one devoted to my Bitnami Rubystack installation and the other to XP
+ Office 2007 + various SPs. The latter opens in a relatively large screen,
but the Bitnami one opens in a smaller window which will not expand beyond
its initial size. I don't know what I did to create these differences, but I
would really enjoy figuring out how to increase the size of the Bitnami XP
VM.
Should I maybe destroy it and start over? I cannot remember what I did to
create the nice big XP window, but that's how I would like the BitNami XP
installation to appear in a window sized similarly.

These problems aside, and my ignorance about Hyper-V and other offerings
admitted, I really like Sun's VirtualBox. At the moment I am running two
instances of XP and one instance of Ubuntu, all on top of Windows Sever 2008
SP2, and everything works lovely. I am slowly concluding that this is the
way to go, in future: for every client project, a VM that emulates his/her
installation. Nothing wrong with a dozen VMs, only two or three of which are
running at any given moment.

(Another question, whose answer I suppose I can look up, but thought it
might prove fruitful to make it a public question: given four slots, what's
the maximum amount of RAM I can plonk into this baby? Are there 4GB chips?
That would take me to 16GB and doubtless that would be very cool in a
VirtualBox environment!)

And just to tie all this up, a segue back to the poetry thread, from T.S.
Eliot:

I grow old, I grow old,
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

A.

-- 
Semi-retired SQL guru, interested in interesting projects not YAFOES (yet
another friendly order entry system).



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