In this lecture, you are going to learn how you can install an OS or Operating System on your Virtual Machines.

So, I have this VM that we created earlier called Windows Server 2016. Now, I haven’t installed anything on the VM, and if I try to Start it is just going to give me an error saying there are no bootable media. You need one thing to install an Operating System after you create a Virtual Machine. You need an ISO, a disk image file that contains the installation media for your Operating System.

Right-click on the Virtual Machine and click on Settings.

Choose Storage from the left pane options, then under Storage Devices click on the Empty Disk icon, and to the right side under Attributes click on the Optical Drive button to display the drop-down menu where we can Choose Virtual Optical Disk File...

In case you don't have an ISO file let’s see how we can download an ISO file.

Open Microsoft Edge or your favorite Web Browser and let’s navigate for example to the Download section of https://www.ubuntu.com.

For any software that provides an evaluation, you can download the ISO and install them in your lab. I would click just this download button and I will probably end with an ISO file and I would just mount that to the Virtual Machine.

So what I can do also is go back to Google and Search for Windows Server 2016 ISO Download and press Enter.

If I open the first search result link page by clicking on the link...

It brings me to the Microsoft Evaluation Center exactly to the Windows Server 2016 ISO download.

You can see it provides 180 days of evaluation and we see that the radio button option is set to ISO.

I will click on the Continue button.

It's going to ask me to register, and I am going to put that information in the form to download the ISO image file to my computer.

Now, click on the Continue button.

Now, I need to select a Language and click on the Download button.

We click on the Save button.

And the download of the ISO file will begin.

Wait for the download to finish, and then we can mount this ISO to our Virtual Machine.

Once the download completes I am going to close the Web Browse and back to VirtualBox Virtual Machine Settings we can Choose the Virtual Optical Disk File...

Navigate to the download location where the ISO file was saved and select the file and click on the Open button.

Now the ISO has been mounted to the Virtual Machine. Click OK to close the Settings window.

Now we can click on the Start button.

The Virtual Machine will launch, and we will be able to install the Operating System.

From the Windows Server 2016 Windows Setup window click the Next button to start the installation making sure the Language, Time, and Keyboard are set to your preferences.

Click on the Install now button.

Now, these are the basic steps to install Windows Server 2016 but the same steps can apply to other operating systems. You download an ISO, mount it to the Virtual Machine, and then you launch the Virtual Machine and install the Operating System.

On the next screen, we choose the Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Evaluation (Desktop Experience) and click Next to continue.

I accept the license terms and click on Next.

I’ll choose Custom: Install Windows only (advanced) because this is the first time we install anything on this Virtual Machine.

I selected Drive 0 Unallocated Space. Notice that the size is 80 GB. This is the Virtual Hard Disk drive that we created earlier when we configured the Virtual Machine.

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