Create a shared folder with an Oracle Linux VirtualBox + Windows 10

With the release of the OBIEE 12c virtual appliance  there's plenty of opportunity conduct demo days, proof of concepts and daily-in-the-life scenarios for your customers and stakeholders. A recurring challenge we continue to hear is the ability to upload custom data sets or BAR files within the VM.

Friendly reminder that the VM is an encapsulated 'machine-in-a-box' that has no network connectivity to your local machine (the host). To enable file sharing between your Virtual Machine and your host, remember to create a shared folder. There's some confusion on how to do this, so we'll explain as follows.

Keep in mind, the 'host' is your local machine, the 'guest' is the virtual machine, and the 'mount' is the shared folder between the host and guest. In this example, the host is a windows 10 machine provisioned by a client, and the guest is the OBIEE 12c v607 Virtual Appliance VM (Oracle Linux) installed on the host accessed via VirtualBox.

Step 1. Identify a folder to share on your host machine.

In this case we'll create a folder in our C:\ drive called shared_vm

Step 2. Add the shared folder to the VirtualBox share

Within your Oracle VirtualBox VM setting navigate to shared folders and mount C:\shared_vm. This tells the VM that C:\shared_vm is the shared folder on the host.

Step 3. Insert the Guest Additions CD Image within the VirtualBox

This is where alot of people fail. I've seen numerous blogs and youtube videos where people attempt to run the guest addition CD image on the host. Guest Addition = guest machine. Do not run the image on the host (windows), run it within Virtual Machine (in this case Oracle Linux). 

By running Devices -> Insert Guest Images CD, you'll be prompted with a selection to 'Open Autorun Prompt'. Not you'll be required required to enter the root password for this image which is 'Admin123'. This isn't a secret, all user/passwords within the appliance are accessible via the default link within firefox.

You'll be prompted with a notification that modprobe vboxsf has failed. modprobe is a function to add or remove module's from the linux OS kernel. 

Execute

sudo usermod -aG vboxsf $(whoami)

to add the logged in user to the vbox group, then restart the server. 

Step 4. Create a shared folder within the guest machine and mount to the virtualbox shared folder

In this example we created a folder called 'shared' in /home/oracle. 

Mount the virtualbox shared folder (called "shared_vm" which was created step 2) to /home/oracle/shared by executing

sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000 shared_vm /home/oracle/shared

To verify, we created a file  in our host location c:\shared_vm which is also visible in the guest folder /home/oracle/shared

Happy demoing!