VirtualBox is a viable LAB option for Certification study. Personally I would prefer to run Hyper-V or XENServer but those solutions are a bit resources heavy for a home LAB. VirtualBox is prefect for older aging hardware.
========= Install VirtualBox ============
On Debian Wheezy I learnt the hard way that the packages in the distro repo are dinosaurs, which I could not get to work with PHPVirtualBox. I installed VirtualBox from the Oracle repo.
PHPVirtualBox did not work with VirtualBox 4.X I had to downgrade to VirtualBox 4.2
Debian-based Linux distributions
Add one of the following lines according to your distribution to your /etc/apt/sources.list :
deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian wheezy contrib
The Oracle public key for apt-secure can be downloaded <a href="https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc">here</a>.
You can add this key with
apt-key add oracle_vbox.asc
or combine downloading and registering:
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
The key fingerprint is
7B0F AB3A 13B9 0743 5925 D9C9 5442 2A4B 98AB 5139
Oracle Corporation (VirtualBox archive signing key) <[email protected]>
To install VirtualBox, do
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.2.18
Ensure DKMS is installed
apt-get install dkms
Install VirtualBox Extension Pack:
========= Install PHPVirtualBox ============
You could manage VirtualBox using the CLI which would get tedious very quickly. The PHPVBOX GUI is a neater way to manage VMS.
========= Enable Bridging ============
The installation of VirtualBox on Linux used to be a major pain point for me. I was never able to get bridging to work until recently.
VBoxManage modifyvm vmname --bridgeadapter1 ethX
or
VBoxManage modifyvm "vm name" --bridgeadapter1 ethX
========= References ============