LUGIE members met at the New Life Church, 1330 East Lugonia Avenue Redlands, CA.  for a presentation on VirtualBox virtualization, given and hosted by Jonathan Marsden.   He explained, wikipedia's definition of Virtualization is a term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources.   It allows the creation of several virtual computers on one physical computer.

Primary uses for virtualization include:
1) Separation/distribution of different functions to different virtual machines
2) Consolidating several physical servers on one computer system
3) Software testing and development
4) Rapid deployment.

VirtualBox is  a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use.   It runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.

During the presentation, the group created a new guest-os using Ubuntu Karmic, to explore the process and configuration options, using Jonathan's 4-core 64-bit desktop system with 6GB RAM.   The group also examined the effects of 'guest additions' which provide the following functions:

1) Virtualized video resolution 
2) Mouse integration
3) copy/paste between host and virtual machine
4) time synchronization
5) folder sharing
6) Automated guest logins
7) seamless windows

After the new Ubuntu guest was set-up and configured, members were able to see 4 guests: windows-2000, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu and one other running simultaneously.  This allowed exploration of several physical system parameters, such as memory usage, and "folder sharing" between the host and a virtual machine.

Jonathan had a well prepared set of slides that he used for the presentation.  They are available for you to download at the following links:
1) PDF: http://crosswire.org/~jmarsden/talks/virtualbox/virtualbox.pdf  ...or 
http://crosswire.org/~jmarsden/talks/virtualbox/virtualbox-2x2.pdf
2) HTML:http://crosswire.org/~jmarsden/talks/virtualbox/virtualbox.html.
3) MagicPoint source: http://crosswire.org/~jmarsden/talks/virtualbox/virtualbox.mgp   
  
The brief video clip, below, is  a small portion of the VideoBox presentation and related  work session during this meeting.