- What are some of the reasons running a virtual machine would be preferable to a bare-metal installation?
- The virtual machine can run inside the current preferred operating system, instead of replacing it or setting up a complicated dual-boot solution.
- A virtual machine can be snapshotted, which means the entire state of the machine is preserved and can be restored.
- Many different operation systems can run on a single machine, concurrently.
- What are some of the downsides of running a virtual machine as opposed to a bare-metal installation?
- There is a little overhead from the virtualization.
- More resources (CPU/RAM/disk) will always be used compared to running a bare-metal installation.
- What is the difference between a type-1 and type-2 hypervisor?
Type-1 hypervisors are installed directly on the physical machine (e.g. VMWare vSphere, KVM, Xen), while type-2 hypervisors are installed in an already running operating system (for example, VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation Player).
- In which two ways can we start a virtual machine on VirtualBox?
- Normally, which opens a new window with the terminal console (or GUI, if a desktop environment is installed).
- Headless, which runs the virtual machine as a server, without a GUI.
- What makes an Ubuntu LTS version special?
LTS stands for Long Term Support. Ubuntu LTS versions are guaranteed updates for five years, instead of the nine months for regular Ubuntu releases.
- What should we do if, after the Ubuntu installation, the virtual machine boots to the Ubuntu installation screens again?
We should check if either the virtual hard disk in higher in the boot order than the optical drive, or we unmount the ISO from the optical drive so only the virtual hard disk is a valid boot target.
- What should we do if we accidentally reboot during installation, and we never end up at the Ubuntu installation (but instead see an error)?
We should ensure the optical disk is higher in the boot order than the virtual hard disk AND we need to make sure the ISO is mounted on the optical disk.
- Why did we setup NAT forwarding for the virtual machine?
So we're not limited to using the terminal console, but instead we can use richer SSH tooling such as PuTTY or MobaXterm.