Oracle VirtualBox What is it?

This is a 2 part series on Virtualbox.

Virtualbox What it is? – Part 1.

Virtualbox How to Use it? – Part 2. – coming soon.

VirtualBox – is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use.  For a thorough introduction to virtualization and VirtualBox, please refer to the online version of the VirtualBox User Manual’s first chapter.

VirtualBox  virtualizer for x86 hardware, developed by Oracle and know as a well established solutions provider with products and solutions for every role in the enterprise.

A new VirtualBox installation on a mac laptop without any images installed.

End User Wiki Documentation (www.virtualbox.com)

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 (XP and later), many Linux distributions, Mac OS X, Solaris and OpenSolaris.

• A supported guest operating system. Besides the user manual (see below), up-to-date information is available at “Status: Guest OSes“.

Best to check the Wiki on settings needed for current Operating Systems ie: Windows 7, 8, and soon Windows 10 or even Mac OX 10.

In Part 2 – Virtualbox How to Use it? We’ll give some specific examples of using Virtualbox to run several operating systems on your laptop or desktop computer without having to setup a new pc.