Installing VirtualBox - Windows Server Tutorial

Since the purpose of this course is to teach you how to install Server 2012 onto your own system, we want to set things up so that you can do this safely without having to worry about causing any problems on your own system. The way we're going to do this is we're going to download VirtualBox. Which will allow us to set up Server 2012 into a virtual machine that will not impact your own machine at all. And this way, even if you do make a mistake, or something goes wrong, you can fix it, or you can redo it, without any impact on your production system. The first thing we need to do to accomplish this is to download the VirtualBox software. VirtualBox is a free software download, which can be found at www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. And as you can see, we have this on the screen here, you can choose whatever version of computer you're running. Since I'm running a Windows machine right here, I'll go ahead and download the Windows version of this. But, if you have some other operation system, you've got that option as well. Now that VirtualBox has gone ahead and downloaded. I'll go ahead and click the executable. So I begin the installation process of Virtual Box. Just go ahead and follow the instructions on the screen until we get to our options screen. For our purposes we're just going to take all the default settings so we can just click next again. I'm just going to take the defaults for this. If you choose to do something else on your own system, such as not have a shortcut on the desktop, that's fine. You can just click accordingly. Again, I'm just going to take the defaults for my setup. And finally, I'm just going to install. Again, install. And then finally, I want to have VirtualBox start up when I finish. So I'm going to click finish. Now, we're ready to install our operating system. However to install an operating system we actually need an operating system. The way we're going to do that is we're going to go ahead to Microsoft's TechNet download center and we're going to download TechNet's evaluation version of Server 2012, it is important to select the correct version of server 2012 for this course. Since we are using Virtual Box, we'll need to download the ISO version of Data Center. Now we have selected the Data Center version, we can go ahead and get started now. At this point, Microsoft will ask you to login with a Microsoft account. If you already have one, go ahead and login with it. If you don't you'll have to create one at this time. Once you log in with a Microsoft email account, Microsoft will then confirm your information and then you can scroll down to the bottom and just click continue. At this point, Microsoft is going to ask you for some additional personal information. Again, just go down to the bottom and click Continue. Now, Microsoft has confirmed all of your information, they are going to want you to download their Akamai NetSession Interface. Go ahead and do that and click the Download Installer. Once the installer is clicked, or downloaded, go ahead and click it, and Microsoft will begin the process. You need to go ahead and agree to their terms, and then click next. Go ahead and allow access through your firewall, and go ahead and click OK so it will create a folder for your download. Now, Akamai is going to ask you where you want to install the files, I am just going to go ahead and choose a default setting, you can choose to put them somewhere else. Once the Akamai net session has been installed, go ahead and click close to exit. Now as you can see around the side, Microsoft is beginning to do the download automatically. This may take a while, depending on the speed of your connection. Now that Microsoft is finished downloading the ISO file, let's go ahead and go over to the Oracle VirtualBox Manager and begin the process of setting it up to accept a new operating system. Now that we're here in the VirtualBox manager, what we need to do is we need to click the new icon. At this point, we need to go ahead and name our virtual machine. I'm going to go ahead and name mine, server 2012 R2. You can, of course, name it anything you like. The type of machine it is, is a, a Microsoft Windows machine and so, we'll go ahead and leave that here and then, we need to go ahead and tell it what version. For version type, we're going to go ahead and scroll down and choose the Windows 2012 64-bit. If you don't see 64-bit options in the drop-down, you'll need to verify that you're currently running a 64-bit operating system. Additionally, you may also need to check that your processor supports either VT-x for an Intel processor or AMD-V for an AMD processor. Those options may also have to be enabled in your BIOS to get your full virtualization capabilities. Now we can click next. In this screen we're going to go ahead and choose the size of RAM we want to use for our virtual machine. Since we're just setting this up for practice purposes, we can go ahead with the the default of two gig, then click next. At this point we want to go ahead and create a virtual hard drive now. The reason we are choosing the virtual hard drive now, iIs because, the virtual machine will treat this as if it is the only hard drive available to it. In reality, what you really have is 25 gig of hard drive space set aside for the virtual machine to use, as if it were a dedicated hard drive. Click create and this screen we're going to choose hard drive file type. We're just going to use the virtual box disk image because that's what we're running this under. If, however, you needed to run this virtual machine under a different platform you can choose the appropriate file type for the platform you're using. Next. This screen tells the computer how to use the hard drive space for the virtual machine. We're going to choose dynamically allocated because that will allow the virtual machine to only use as much of the 25 gig as it absolutely has to for storage purposes. Now this screen just goes ahead and rephrases everything that we've already stated. The name of our virtual machine, which is server 2012 r2 and the amount of hard drive space that we've set aside for the dedicated hard drive, then create. From this screen you are ready to being the installation process.