Lab setup

- [Instructor] In this course, I'll be using a system with Ubuntu installed on it. Some virtual machine software allows what's called nested virtualization, where you can create a virtual machine inside of a virtual machine. But my favorite free hypervisor, VirtualBox, doesn't do that. So if you're using VirtualBox, you won't be able to follow along very well. If you're using other virtualization software for your lab, you can check whether your software supports it. But while we're learning about virtualization, it's best to keep things simple. So I recommend using Ubuntu installed natively. In order to work with virtual machines, you should make sure your computer's processor offers the features that allow virtualization to work. If you have a reasonably modern Intel or AMD processor, you should have this capability. You can search online to find out for certain. You can check whether your processor is offering the virtualization features from the Linux command line by checking for the vmx or svm flags on your processor with egrep vmx or svm out of proc/cpuinfo. Here I can see that the vmx flag is available, meaning that my Intel processor has support for virtualization. You'll see svm if you have an AMD processor that has hardware support for virtualization. If you expect to have support but you're not seeing it, check your BIOS to see if you need to enable it specifically. On Intel machines this capability is called VT, for Virtualization Technology. And on AMD machines, it's called SVM, or Secure Virtual Machine. Your system's BIOS will be different than mine, so I won't show you how to do that specifically. Sometimes the setting is in a security or CPU features menu. Throughout the course, we'll be using the Linux command line and desktop and downloading some tools and software. So for this course, I expect that you have a basic familiarity with the command line and how to manage your system and download software. Because we need something to use inside of the virtual machines we'll create, I'll be installing Linux in the machines as we go. But, I'll go through that process quickly. I'm not going to spend the time going through the details within the installers. That's not what this course is about. So you'll need to take a few minutes as we install and go through the process yourself. That means you'll need to set aside some time to follow along. So, you might want to watch through the course first, and then follow along later if you're pressed for time. If you're not familiar with installing Linux, take a look at our courses that cover installation before you continue here. Unless I mention otherwise, the installations that I'll speed through are very basic default installs with nothing special about them. If you're configuring machines for production use, of course, you'll need to make sure that you set them up according to your requirements. But here in the Linux lab we'll just use basic installs so we can move on to the interesting stuff.