Oracle Virtual Box - Server 2012 installation

The Virtual Machine:

This topic is well covered by WiKi and has been around since the early 60s.

There are many products that attempt to provide Virtual Machines.

Some of the most popular are VMware, Windows Virtual PC and Oracle VM Virtual Box.

I have a powerful system with a 6 core CPU and 16G of RAM and I can easily have a Virtual Machine running without my OS being crippled.

I have been trying to get to grips with Server 2012 (windows 8 server) and I encountered a few obstacles, I will share my experience hopefully this will help anyone struggling with the same issues.

I tried to create a Virtual Machine using Windows Virtual PC which does not support a 64 bit OS so bear that in mind.

I check if Virtual Box supported 64 bit OS and is it did so I have installed my Server 2012 via this method.

I downloaded the 180 day trial of erver 2012 via the Microsoft download page

Download Windows Server 2012. By the way this does not require any licenses and the product can be registered at a later date.

Creating the Virtual Machine.

To create the virtual machine (VM) you will need to setup a few things when you power up the Oracle VM Virtual Box.

I created a 20G virtual disk using a VDI disk type for the VM.

If you intent to have this as a live Server afterwards you should a larger virtual disk space.

I also set aside 4G of system memory for the Server 2012. I can do this as I have 16G of RAM in my system, if you have less memory available you need to tailor this to your own resources.

This is also where you select the boot order.

Do not select ICH9 for the chip-set as that is mainly for MAC OS and is still in experimental state.

I selected 2 cores for the 6 cores available on my CPU.

You will need to point a CD to an ISO image for the installation so that the systems start the installation when you reboot the VM. Also once the VM is running add the VBox Guest additions ISO image which can be downloaded from Oracle web site.

At this point just proceed to start the VM and follow the installation prompts which are very similar to most Microsoft Windows installation. The setting up of the server will be done once the OS is up and running.

I have now setup the server using 2 cores, 4G ram and 20G drive.

This has not put that much strain on my rig as you can see from the picture below. In particular the utilization is approx between 15% and 20%.

The first problems I had was connecting the VM to the network. I found a multitude of posts via many forums with similar issues.

As Virtual Box has no entry for Server 2012 (see picture) you will need to select Windows 2008 64 bit. This seems to work for my installation.

For the network choose the Bridged option as this will work once you select the correct environment for the server (Windows 2008 64 bit)

As far as the installation that is it. You have many options on the Virtual Box that can be tweaked for example how you want to deal with the mouse and the clipboard so do check out the documentation provided.