A brief guide on how to get started with virtualization on Linux

virtualization on Linux.md

Getting started with virtualization on Linux

After doing a lot of VM-hopping, from QEMU to VirtualBox and whatnot, I finally decided to stick to VMWare Player (not sponsored btw) to use as my go to hyperviser. Granted, its paid counterpart or even its other open source counterparts might have more features to offer, but I decided to stick to ease of use and reliability. For some reason, VirtualBox just dies when KDE is run on it, and QEMU tends to pose a lot of display scaling issues sometimes. I'm not saying that VMWare is always perfect either, but it's still more usable, in my opinion. So I put together a small guide to set stuff up as easily as possible on an Arch/Arch-based machine.

Prerequisites

• Virtualization enabled in the BIOS

Note: This tutorial is focussed on Arch based distros. The steps should be the same on just about anything else; however, the name of the packages might differ.

Installation

Install vmware-workstation. It is also necessary to install the appropriate header package(s) for your installed kernel(s): for example linux-headers or linux-lts-headers.

yay -Sy vmware-workstation

Then, as desired, enable some of the following services:

• vmware-networks.service for guest network access (otherwise you will get an error could not connect 'ethernet 0' to virtual network and you will not be able to use vmware-netcfg
• vmware-usbarbitrator.service for connecting USB devices to guest.
  

To list all the available services on your system, do

sudo systemctl list-unit-files --type=service

Lastly, load the VMware modules:

sudo modprobe -a vmw_vmci vmmon

To list all available modules on your system, do:

find -L /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/ | grep -i <name_of_module>

Launch your application with

vmplayer

Optionally, reboot your system before launching the application to ensure all of the previously enabled services start up.

Enabling UEFI BIOS

By default, the systems you go on to install won't have a UEFI BIOS. To fix that, simply navigate to the directory of your VM and then find the file <VM_Name>.vmx, and add in the line firmware = "efi" to the file.
This is what it should look like:

#!/usr/bin/vmware
.encoding = "UTF-8"
firmware = "efi"
config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "19"

...

Setting up an Arch guest

Install the system like you would normally. Once done, do the following (on the guest, obviously)

## Install tools and drivers necessary for a seamless experience between the host and the guest OS
sudo pacman -Sy open-vm-tools gtkmm3 gtkmm gtk2 xf86-video-vmware xf86-input-vmmouse
## Enable the required services
sudo systemctl enable vmtoolsd.service
sudo systemctl enable vmware-vmblock-fuse.service
sudo systemctl enable vmtoolsd

At this stage, feel free to reboot your system to let the changes take effect.

You may add the following line

vmware-user

to /etc/profile to enable the bidirectional clipboard as soon as the guest OS boots up.

Enjoy!