Spinning Up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 Workstation VM in VirtualBox

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Introduction

While this tutorial only covers creating a RHEL VM, there are many more Red Hat products available to try with a Red Hat Developer membership.

Creating a Red Hat Developers Account

A prerequisite to downloading an ISO file for RHEL is to have a Red Hat Developer’s account.

Register a Red Hat Developer Membership

From Red Hat Developer’s website:

A Red Hat Developer membership comes with a ton of benefits, including no-cost access to products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

•  1 year of access to all Red Hat products
•  Developer learning resources
•  Virtual and in-person tech events
•  Red Hat Customer Portal access
•  Exclusive content
•  Access to the Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift, a shared OpenShift and Kubernetes cluster for practicing your skills

Downloading the Red Hat ISO

After registering a Red Hat Developer Membership and logging in, click the button “Download RHEL at no-cost“.

Creating a New Virtual Machine in VirtualBox

Click “New” to create a new virtual machine.

Give the virtual machine a descriptive name.

Select the ISO image.

Check “Skip Unattended Installation”

Click “Next”.

Assign Hardware in VirtualBox

The list below has the values I used for hardware assignment on the Red Hat VM.

• Base Memory: 4000 MB
• Processors: 2

Click “Next”.

I provided 100 GB of disk space for the virtual hard disk and did not pre-allocate the full size. Pre-allocating the full size causes the initial VM creation to take longer, but there are performance improvements.

RED HAT ENTERPRISE 9.4 INSTALLATION

Create a User

Under the “User Settings” menu, select “User Creation”.

Enter optional value into “Full name” field.

Enter required value into “User name” field.

Check “Make this user administrator”.

Enter required value into “Password” and “Confirm” password fields.

Installation Destination

Under the “SYSTEM” menu, select “Installation Destination”.

Select your disk under “Local Standard Disks”.

Connect to Red Hat

Under the “SOFTWARE” menu, select “Connect to Red Hat.”

You can authenticate with Red Hat servers with either your account credentials or an activation key. In the video I demonstrate how to authenticate with your account credentials.

Select the “Account” radio button under the “Authentication” label

Enter your username into the “User name” field

Enter your password into the “Password” field

Under the “Purpose” menu, check “Set System Purpose”

Set the Role as “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation”

Set the SLA as “Self-Support”

Set the Usage as “Development/Test”

Optionally check “Connect to Red Hat Insights” under the “Insights” menu

Click the “Register” button

Software Selection

Under the “SOFTWARE” menu, select “Software Selection”.

Under the “Base Environment” menu, select “Workstation”.

Click “Done”

Begin Installation

Next click the “Begin Installation” button. It will take several minutes for RHEL to install and the system will restart once the installation is finished.

VirtualBox Guest Additions

VirtualBox Guest Additions greatly improves the user experience of VirtualBox VMs using desktop environments.

Install kernel development tools.

sudo dnf install kernel-devel -y

Click “Devices” in the top toolbar of VirtualBox.

Click “Insert VirtualBox Guest Additions CD Image”

Open files and select the attached drive “VBox_GAs_7….”

Click “Run Software”

Click “Run”

Authenticate with super user password

Power off the VM

VirtualBox Display Settings

Click “Settings” in the VirtualBox Manager window.

Select “Display” in the left toolbar.

Move the dial to the highest value possible for “Video Memory”

Check “Enable 3D Acceleration” under “Extended Features”

Change Hostname

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname desiredhostname

Conclusion

In this tutorial you learned how that it is free to register for a Red Hat Developer membership, and how to create Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 VM.

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