UW CSE Home Virtual Machines

CSE Home

About Us

Search

Contact Info

Overview Policies and Expectations 64- vs. 32-bits Using VMware Linux VMs Windows VMs User Forums

Overview The CSE lab prepares virtual machine images that, in a rough sense, allow you to take a lab Windows or Linux workstation home with you -- you simply boot the virtual machine as an application on your personal system. For instance, if you run Windows, you can have a Linux system running on it, without the hassle of dual booting (or even installing Linux!). If you have a Mac or Linux, you can run a real Windows system. (You can also run a Linux VM on a Linux box, or a Windows VM on a Windows box, and you might want to do that to insulate the two environments from each other.) You want at least one of these VMs. They come with a relatively rich set of pre-installed software. Some pre-configuration has been done to make it easier to remotely connect to and interact with CSE systems than it is from generic Linux or Windows machines. Additionally, because they are separate machines from the host system on which they run, they are reasonably isolated from it -- instabilities in your VM won't clobber your native machine, and (most likely) vice versa. In fact, a big benefit to you of the VMs is that they make it much more likely that you can get help from instructors and TAs if something goes wrong, because your VM's configuration is a "known commodity," whereas your home machine's configuration could be in any of roughly 210000 different states. CSE home virtual machines can be run using software from VMware1. If your machine runs Windows or Linux, you can use VMware Player, which is free to everyone (in the world). If you have a Mac, you can run VMware Fusion, which is free to CSE students, inexpensive for UW students, and still pretty cheap for everyone else. Preparing your home VM is basically a three step process: Install the appropriate VMware application: Player for Windows or Linux, and Fusion for Macs. Get a copy of the Linux or Windows virtual machine "image," which is simply a set of files. (Download information is given on the VM specific information page.) Because those files are the state of an entire machine, they're big, bigger than a DVD. Your options are: If the target machine can be plugged into a University of Washington network, you can download the files directly to it. If not, you can bring a USB drive to campus, use a UW machine to download the files onto the USB drive, and then take the drive to your machine. (You'll need over 4GB of free space on the drive.) Boot the virtual machine and perform some very modest initial setup. At that point, you're ready to use your virtual machine. You should keep in mind that virtual machines are, well, real machines, meaning they're subject to the same sorts of security vulnerabilities as any other machine. You should apply patches/updates as they are made available. (Both the Windows and the Linux systems make this easy.) Next: Policies and Expectations 1 The VM images are standard .vmx/.vmdk files. This means that if you are already using a different virtualization technology (e.g. VirtualBox, KVM) you can most likely continue using it, although such usage is not supported.

	Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to support]