Windows 7 Virtual Box

[cybercore]

Virtual Box









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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.

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 Sun ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.


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Guest OSes


Virtual Box Video Tutorials

Screenshots

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A general-purpose full virtualizer targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.


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.

• Guest Additions for Windows, Linux and Solaris. VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows, Linux and Solaris virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window). There are also guest additions for OS/2 with somewhat reduced functionality.

• Shared folders. Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as "shared folders", which can then be accessed from within virtual machines.

A number of extra features are available with the full VirtualBox release only (see the "Editions" page for details):

• Virtual USB Controllers. VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device specific drivers on the host.

• Remote Desktop Protocol. Unlike any other virtualization software, VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to "run" the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data.

• USB over RDP. With this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices that are connected on the RDP client. This way, a powerful server machine can virtualize a lot of thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in.

Versions

VirtualBox comes in different versions, depending on your needs. Please see the Editions page for details.

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User Manual

 

[cybercore]

Many tutorials and demos on youtube:


Virtualbox 2.1 OpenGL 3D Accelerated Gaming Demo







Ubuntu 10.04 with Compiz in VirtualBox

 

[Joe S]

I used to use Virtual Box to test XP slipstreams. The one thing I didn't like was networking was not simple for an amateur. You had use a bridged connection. Did they improve this? Or is Shared Folder the easiest option? The VMware is simple just select the networking in the settings and it's done.
Joe

 

[Mike]

From my experience, you will find that VMWare Workstation and its related products are far superior to Virtual Box, but this also comes with the price tag of the software. To their credit, VMWare Player is still free, but the latest iterations of VMWare Workstation are incredibly feature-rich and far superior to anything that has hit the market to date. The only competition is really in the server market between VMWare, Citrix, and Microsoft's bare metal hypervisor solutions.

 

[cybercore]

VMPlayer is as free as Virtual Box is. : )

 

[Agent Data]

Is a nice light-weight VM and better than MS XP-Mode in terms of speed provided it's configured correctly.

 

[mountainman]

There is no need to change frequency scaling for VMware and don't intercept all key events, which allows to cycle through desktops without having to go out of the VM first.