I want to create a partition in virtual machine Ubuntu 11.10 32 bit so that I can test a few things. I use a guide for something I want to do and it says that I should create a partition in my system but I do not want to have a partition in my main system so I think that I can install Ubuntu 11.10 32 bit on virtual machine, then create a partition in virtual disk, is it possible?
SnapOverflow
Creating a virtual machine to test things is a briliant idea, I wish more people would do that instead of corrupting their main install. If it is possible for your use case, most probably YES, but you're not being very specific. If you know you want an extra partition on forehand, you can create it during install of the VM. VirtualBox is a good application for running VM's and it is in the standard repositories.
The fun about virtual machines is that you can completely mess up things inside a VM, while your host OS stays up running stable. Worst case scenario is that it runs somewhat slower because the VM is using a lot of CPU or (disk) IO.
Personally I always have a few VM's installed, just to test things.
In many modern PC's you can enable VT-x or AMD-V extensions, which will dramatically improve performance of virtual machines. Refer to the manual of your motherboard for this.
When you create a virtual machine using software as Parallels, VirtualBox or VmWare you will be asked to assign a disk to that machine, you can use either a physical read drive or create a virtual disk.
A virtual disk is nothing but a file that resides in your host computer that is mounted as a drive and can be used as a drive in you guest computer.
If you boot from the Ubuntu CD inside a virtual machine that is using a virtual disk all the operation on that disk will be done to the file pretending to be your disk and no actual changes will be do to the host system's drive.
Once you created the virtual machine in your virtualization software you can check if indeed you are going to use a virtual disk in the machine properties
Anything you do to that virtual disk will not affect your host system, its just a dummy disk that uses a mounted file as a disk. Feel free to do whatever you want to that virtual disk.
It most certainly is.
If it's you're first time playing around with a virtual machine than I suggest you use virltualbox. It's very straightforward and has a nice wizard for when you make a virtual machine. At a certain point in the wizard, you will be asked to create a virtual disk. I suggest you use the virtualbox VDI format with dynamically expanding storage. Basically you will be left with a file on your disk that is used by virtualbox as the virtual HDD. Once you boot the vm, you can then partition this virtual disk from inside the vm with whatever operating system you decide to install.