Poor Mans Virtualized Server

The Problem

IT Budgets in Pacific Island countries are quite limited. In the Cook Islands, IT budget items are the very first things to be cut. Therefore the use of innovative ways of utilizing existing resources and maximizing efficiency become important.

One way of doing this is to turn old PC’s, most with decent amounts of processing power into mini virtualized servers. The problem is most serious virtualized solutions require specialized investment in server hardware which in most cases is out of the reach of most of us working in the Pacific Islands. So what can we do?

The Solution

Build a Poor Mans Virtualized Server. In this tutorial we will look at setting up a headless VirtualBox server with phpVirtualBox for remote management running on Turnkey Linux LAMP. Since Virtualbox can run on any standard hardware you can re-purpose old [or new] desktop PC’s into virtualized servers.

This is based on TurnkeyLinux LAMP Wheezy 13.0 and Virtualbox 4.3.1 (Wheezy Backports)

Install Turnkey Linux LAMP

For instructions on how to install, please follow the tutorial here. http://ciiag.org/index.php/tutorials/219-installing-a-turnkey-lamp-server

Installing VirtualBox

We need to add the TurnkeyLinux repository for add the public key and install VirtualBox

nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sources.list
deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ wheezy-backports main contrib

Run the following commands:

apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,')
wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get -t wheezy-backports install virtualbox

Install VirtualBox Extension Pack

Now we need to install VirtualBox Extension Pack. The extension pack allows for VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support, The virtual USB 2.0 (EHCI) device, Intel PXE boot ROM with support for the E1000 network card and Experimental support for PCI passthrough on Linux hosts

cd /tmp
wget http://dlc-cdn.sun.com/virtualbox/4.3.18/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.3.18.vbox-extpack
VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.3.18.vbox-extpack

We need to create vbox user for VirtualBox and phpVirtualBox and add it to vboxusers group

useradd -d /home/vbox -m -g vboxusers -s /bin/bash vbox

Set a password for the user, in this case vbox

passwd vbox

Create the file /etc/default/virtualbox and put the following lines so that the VirtualBox SOAP API which is called vboxwebsrv runs as the user vbox

nano /etc/default/virtualbox
VBOXWEB_USER=vbox

Next we need to set vboxweb-service to start on boot

update-rc.d vboxweb-service defaults
/etc/init.d/vboxweb-service start

Installing phpVirtualBox

Now we are going to install phpVirtualBox

cd /var/www/
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpvirtualbox/files/phpvirtualbox-4.3-1.zip/download
unzip phpvirtualbox-4.3-1.zip
mv phpvirtualbox-4.3-1 phpvirtualbox

Copy the config file and set the user and password for your vbox user

cd /var/www/phpvirtualbox/
cp config.php-example config.php
nano config.php
/* Username / Password for system user that runs VirtualBox */
var $username = 'vbox';
var $password = 'yourpassword';

That’s it. Open your browser and login using the default

username: admin
password: admin

Make sure to change the default passwords

Issues and Workarounds

We had numerous issues because we were behind a firewall, here were our workarounds.

Instructions for being behind a proxy [Optional]

If you are behind a firewall, do this first. Note that we did experience some issues with wget and used a workaround (see issues) but it’s best to let the network administrator know what you are trying to do. In our experience it’s best to do this without a firewall in the way.

nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01turnkey

add the line

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://username:password@proxyserver:port";

where

• username = your own username
• password = your own password
• proxyserver = IP Address of your proxy server
• port = port of your proxy server

Wget blocked by firewall

Had issues with wget being blocked by our proxy server but we used our windows machine to download the files we needed and then re-uploaded them to the host machine using webmin.