VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction.
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.
OS : Windows XP/Vista/7 (x86/x64)
Released : December 02, 2010
VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Oracle ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.
Some of the features of VirtualBox are:
Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don't have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox.
Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.
In order to run VirtualBox on your machine, you need:
- Reasonably powerful x86 hardware. Any recent Intel or AMD processor should do.
- Memory. Depending on what guest operating systems you want to run, you will need at least 512 MB of RAM (but probably more, and the more the better). Basically, you will need whatever your host operating system needs to run comfortably, plus the amount that the guest operating system needs. So, if you want to run Windows XP on Windows XP, you probably won't enjoy the experience much with less than 1 GB of RAM. If you want to try out Windows Vista in a guest, it will refuse to install if it is given less than 512 MB RAM, so you'll need that for the guest alone, plus the memory your operating system normally needs.
- Hard disk space. While VirtualBox itself is very lean (a typical installation will only need about 30 MB of hard disk space), the virtual machines will require fairly huge files on disk to represent their own hard disk storage. So, to install Windows XP, for example, you will need a file that will easily grow to several GB in size.
- A supported host operating system. Presently, we support Windows (primarily XP) and many Linux distributions on 32-bit hosts and on 64-bit hosts. Support for Mac OS X and Solaris and OpenSolaris appeared in 1.6.
- A supported guest operating system.
Change log
* VMM: fixed rare host crash when running 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts.
* VMM: fixed host reboots under rare circumstances due to NMIs triggered by active performance counters (Linux hosts in non-VT-x/AMD-V mode only;).
* VMM: fixed out of memory guru meditation for large memory guests.
* VMM: fixed a guru meditation related to large pages.
* VMM: use new VT-x feature to keep the guest from hogging the CPU.
* Snapshots: implemented deleting the last remaining snapshot while the VM is running.
* GUI: perform the checks for exceeding the size limit of the host file system and for broken asynchronous I/O on older Linux kernels with ext4 / xfs file systems not only when starting the VM from scratch but also when starting from a saved state.
* NAT: fixed memory leak (3.2.0 regression;).
* Networking: fixed VM reset handling in e1000.
* VRDP: fixed rare crash in multimonitor configuration.
* Display: fixed occasional guest resize crash.
* Mouse: don't send relative mouse events together with absolute mouse events (3.2.10 regression; ).
* Keyboard: fixes for the USB keyboard emulation; fixes for Koran keyboards.
* Serial: don't hang if the host device would block during open.
* Serial: fixed modem status lines (Linux hosts only;).
* Graphics: Horizontal resolutions are no longer restricted to a multiple of 8 pixels (bug #2047; requires Guest Additions update).
* USB: fixed a crash with older Linux kernels and non-ASCII characters in device strings (Linux hosts only; version 3.2.8 contained an incomplete fix).
* USB: fixed a crash under rare circumstances (Windows hosts only).
* iSCSI: respond to NOP-In requests from the target immediately to avoid being disconnected if the guest is idle.
* 3D support: fixed a crash under certain circumstances.
* 3D support: fixed crashes for GLUT based apps.
* 3D support: added missing GLX 1.3 functionality.
* 2D Video acceleration: fixed potential deadlock when saving the VM state.
* Windows hosts: another fix for BSODs under certain circumstances in VBoxNetFlt.sys.
* Solaris hosts: fixed host USB DVD drive detection
* Mac OS X hosts: fixed swapped keys for certain ISO keyboard types.
* Linux hosts: added link state handling for TAP devices needed for proper operation with bridged networking on kernels 2.6.36 and above.
* Linux hosts/guests: Linux 2.6.37 fixes
* Linux Additions: properly compile the vboxvideo module if DKMS is not installed.
* Linux Additions: fixed a memory leak when accessing non-existing files on a Shared Folders.
* Windows Additions: skip none-mapped user accounts when enumerating user accounts for VM information