Virtualization Support

by Green Screens Ltd.

With the latest release we added support to virtualization technologies such as Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle Virtual Box, VMWare, QUEMU and others.

Virtualization technology allows running software products in isolated environments allowing full control over installation and preventing host system pollution. Prepared images are ready to run with preinstalled Linux OS and other required elements.

Many companies install software in isolated environments, however, preparing and installing systems takes time. Corporate IT usually installs MS Windows OS in a virtual environment, and then installs SW. However, graphical OS often requires much more resources than headless systems.  Thus, to get optimal configuration and performance we have pre-installation virtual disk images based on Alpine Linux 3.12. specially built for virtualization engines.

Pre-installation images contain self-install scripts that will install runtime environment and Green Screens Terminal Service for IBM I by downloading required files from the Internet.

Benefits of pre-installation images versus ready-to-run images are in size and latest version automatic installation. Pre-installation images we provide are only 30MB zipped virtual drives in average while ready-to-run images might be between 1GB to 10GB in size depending on virtual drive format.

We distribute images in several most common formats: VMDK, VHD, VHDX

  • VMDK – interchangeable format supported by QUEMU, Virtual Box, VMWare
  • VHD – interchangeable format supported by QUEMU, Virtual Box, Hyper-V
  • VHDX – improved VHD format supported by Microsoft Hyper-V

Supported formats can be converted in different formats for other virtualization engines.

Images can be imported into various cloud providers also.

For an example:

  • Amazon Cloud – VHD, VHDX, VMDK
  • Google Cloud – VHD, VMDK
  • IBM Cloud – VHD, VMDK
  • Microsoft Azure - VHDs

To see how to set it up in Microsoft Hyper-V, check out the manual here.