Virtual Machine Installation and Configuration

Virtual Machine

Much of the XNAT Workshop 2012 material will use a virtual machine that will come configured with the following specifications:

The virtual machine will be available on a USB flash drive as well as on the NRG FTP site prior to the workshop. The URL for the FTP site is:

ftp://ftp.nrg.wustl.edu/pub/xnat/workshop/Camp%20XNAT%202012.zip

You can find a lot of the information necessary to use the VM in the README.txt.

The primary VM user account is xnat. The password for all accounts on the virtual machine is xnat2012.

There is a local mail server using postfix running on the VM. This can send email to any user account on the VM using the address user@xnat.org, e.g. xnat@xnat.org. You can check the mail for any user by logging in or su'ing as that user and running the alpine mail client.

Laptop Requirements

We strongly encourage all attendees to bring their own laptop. We are also offering laptop rentals from the Washington University School of Medicine IT department. The rental fee is $50 per day. If you want to rent a laptop, please contact us soon to reserve one.

Your laptop should at least meet the following requirements (when it comes to running virtual machines, the more powerful the laptop the better, so exceeding these requirements is great!):

• At least a dual-core processor
• At least 2GB of RAM, although we strongly suggest you have at least 4GB of RAM.
• The provided virtual machine will be 32-bit, so there are no requirements as to whether you have a 32- or 64-bit operating system.
• At least a few GB of free hard drive space
• A free working USB port.
• A virtualization platform product

Virtualization Platform

After much back-and-forth'ing (does that really qualify as a verb?), we've decided to provide the XNAT Workshop virtual machine without snapshots. This is due to limitations in VMWare Player and the snapshots making the virtual machine incompatible with VirtualBox. The next section of this post has been updated to reflect the availability of VirtualBox as an alternative for the virtualization platform.

Virtual machines require a platform on the host machine in order to run:

• For Windows, VMWare offers the free VMWare Player
• If you have a license or want to use a trial version, the more full-featured Windows product from VMWare is VMWare Workstation
• For OS X, VMWare has a trial (non-free) version of VMWare Fusion; note that this has some fairly specific system requirements, including Intel-based 64-bit OS X 10.6.7 or later (including Lion)
• For Windows, Linux, and OS X, you can use the free VirtualBox product

All of the VMWare products, including the free and trial versions, require you to create an account with VMWare to download the installers. If you want to use one of the VMWare products, you should register and install before coming to the workshop!

We are providing the virtual machine in the VMX format for VMWare products. That means that, if you choose to use a VMWare product, you'll automatically get the default hardware settings and be able to open the VM directly. If you use VirtualBox, you'll need to create a new machine instance and use the virtual disk (vmdk file) from the XNAT Workshop virtual machine.