Pre-Setup - VirtualBox VM Setup

Pre-Setup - VirtualBox VM Setup

    If you're installing the MicroStrategy on a physical machine, you can go ahead and skip the following.

    Once you have installed VirtualBox, go ahead and start it up and click on 'New'.  You should be presented with a New Virtual Machine Wizard.

Go ahead and click 'Next'.  The next screen will be the name of your new virtual machine.  Type in a name, change the Operating System to 'Linux', and the Version to 'openSUSE (64 bit).

Next, specify the amount of base memory that we're going to use for this Virtual Machine.  Since I'll be installing the Intelligence Server, Metadata database, and Web all in the same Virtual Machine, I'm going to put this at 1GB.  If the machine you're using only has a couple GB of ram, you may want to be conservative with this setting.  After you've selected a setting you're happy with, click 'Next'.

Now we need to create a Virtual Hard Disk for our new Virtual Machine.  Leave 'Create new hard disk' selected and choose 'Next'.

Next, select the type of Virtual Disk that you'd like to create.  This is your preference, I typically just select 'Dynamically expanding storage' to conserve disk space.

Now we'll select the name, location, and size of our Virtual Disk.  I typically leave the location and name default.  For this particular MicroStrategy, I'm going to allocate 20GB of disk space so that we have plenty to grow.  The default openSUSE installation will use up around 3GB before we even do anything with MicroStrategy.

Finally, you'll be presented with a couple of Summary screens showing the settings and configuration that you chose.  Simply hit 'Finish' on these screens, and you'll be back out at the main VirtualBox screen.  Now we'll want to change a couple settings that we weren't presented with during the setup process.  Select your new Virtual Machine in the left-side pane, and click the 'Settings' button.

Once the 'Settings' dialog pops up, navigate to the 'Network' tab, and modify the Adapter 'Attached to' settings from 'NAT' to 'Bridged Adapter'.  This will allow us to interact with our Intelligence Server via outside clients (Desktop/Web) once we have those components setup.

Before exiting the 'Settings' dialog, you may want to modify a few other settings, however it's not required.  I'll typically increase Video Memory to 128MB just because, however the VM should run fine without that.

Once you exit out of the 'Settings' dialog, go ahead and select your new VM and click 'Start'.  You should be presented with a 'First Run Wizard'.  Go ahead and click 'Next', this is where we're going to select our openSUSE 11.2 x64 ISO that we previously downloaded.  VirtualBox is going to mount this ISO as a CD/DVD-ROM device, allowing us to install as if we have the physical disk media in a physical server.

Click on the 'Browse' button underneath 'Media Source' which will bring up the Virtual Media Manager.  From this dialog is where we can add the local OpenSUSE ISO image to use for our installation.

Click 'Add' on the toolbar, and navigate to where you downloaded the openSUSE ISO file.  Once found, click 'Open', and you'll see your ISO image now in the list of CD/DVD images.  Now we can select it as a 'Media Source' for our installation.  Highlight the openSUSE ISO image, and hit 'Select'.

Now you'll see the 'Media Source' shows our openSUSE ISO file, we can continue with the installation.  Hit 'Next', then 'Finish'.  The VirtualBox will reset, and you'll see the openSUSE main menu.

That's it for the VirtualBox Setup!