The mission is this Lab is to create genuine hands-on experience for hands-on learnings who want to learn to use Ansible to create auto-installing Ubuntu ISOs and use them to stand up a server lab in Oracle VirtualBox.

Mission:

• Install Ansible and other required packages on a new Ubuntu system
• Prepare ssh keys for managing the Ansible servers
• Install VirtualBox using Ansible
• Customize the user-data for unattended installation
• Create a custom Ubuntu server ISO that automatically installs
• Deploy our first Ubuntu VM to OracleBox
• Test our first Ubuntu VM
• Delete our first Ubuntu VM
• Deploy our first fleet of VMs
• Deploy an application to our fleet of VMs

Materials:

• NUC
  • Recommend a more powerful NUC with 16GB RAM and 500GB disk space
    • Most mid-range NUCs have 4 physical CPUs for a total of 8 cores. Most Gen12 and Gen13 NUCs have more cores available.
  • Yes you can create an VM in VMware and run Oracle Virtualbox…
    • IF you enable “Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI” under Settings > Processors in VMware
    • BUT However, I had issues the network connectivity on the Oracle guests, both bridging and NATting. Setting the promiscuous mode settings on the Virtualbox guest didn't solve the issue.

References:

• https://rutgerblom.com/2020/07/27/automated-ubuntu-server-20-04-installation-with-ansible/ (Gitlab)
• https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/ubuntu-22-04-server-autoinstall-iso/

This Lab was refactored, improved, and moved to GitHub in 2024.

https://github.com/doritoes/NUC-Labs/blob/main/VirtualBox_Linux/README.md