## Introduction ##
A core goal of the BSD Certification Group is to validate expertise in administering BSD systems.  The BSD Associate exam provided the first step in this direction by providing a written examination that focused on BSD systems.  The next step moves closer to this goal by providing a 'hands-on' exam that allows the candidate to directly demonstrate expertise by building, and configuring BSD systems according to specific requirements.

This document is written to help candidates prepare for the hands-on lab by providing a method of configuring virtual BSD systems using QEMU and AQEMU.  Both these programs are freely available on the Internet and provide a high quality virtualization platform for lab development.

QEMU is an Open Source processor emulator program (similar to VMWare) developed by Fabrice Bellard and available at <http://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page>. QEMU has several advanced features that make it possible to run multiple guest systems with different configurations all on the same host.  QEMU is available free of charge.

AQEMU is a graphical wrapper program for QEMU written in Qt4.  It has an easy to use  interface and provides the capability to contstruct and manage multiple virtualized guest systems all on the same host.  AQEMU is developed by Andrey Rijov and is available at <http://sourceforge.net/projects/aqemu>. 

Note that it is possible to use QEMU without AQEMU, and there are several tutorials written for QEMU that ofer detailed command line instructions for doing so.  The instructions in this document were developed using the BSD Certification Group MultiBSD DVD and revised for the Fall / Winter 2012 edition.  QEMU and AQEMU were both installed as packages.  Both QEMU and AQEMU are under active development, so features described in this document may be slightly different in the latest versions.

Note that both QEMU and AQEMU are included in the DVD and are used with the gracious permission of the authors.






**Next:** [[Installing_FreeBSD_with_Qemu_and_Aqemu]]
