VirtualBox 5.1.6

On September 13, 2016, Oracle announced the release of a corrective release of the VirtualBox 5.1.6 virtualization system.

The release includes 28 fixes to improve stability and eliminate regression changes.

Among the changes:

VirtualBox 5.1.4

Correction:

• The installer for the Linux platform has fixed several bugs that caused installation failures on some Linux distributions;
• Fixed a problem with the normal display of the mouse pointer when operating guest systems with Linux and Solaris in a Windows host environment;
• Additions for Linux guest systems improve the operation of the video driver in 32-bit guest systems with large video memory;
• The video driver included in the add-ons for Linux guest systems adds support for the Linux 4.7 kernel and provides a workaround for an error in the X server that causes screen updating to stop;
• Crashes and freezes that occur during the operation of the audio subsystem and USB have been eliminated;
• Improved stability on NVMe drives;
• Fixed problems with incorrectly limiting storage access bandwidth when setting the limit values ​​too small.

VirtualBox 5.1.2

Major changes

• Implementation of APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) and I/O APIC, notable for a significant increase in performance for certain types of load (when using network functions);
• Migrating the interface to Qt5;
• Enabling passive processing of API requests, which increased the performance and responsiveness of the VM GUI;
• The Detach UI function has been moved to the virtual machine management menu;
• Support for paravirtualized Hyper-V debugging for Windows guest environments;
• Advanced MMIO (Memory-mapped I/O) emulation;
• Audio output improvements: Added HDA (High Definition Audio) support for modern Linux guests. Improved performance when performing audio operations and reduced CPU load. The AC"97 emulator provides the ability to more accurately control volume;
• Improved Python 3 support;
• The session information window has been redesigned;
• The new virtual machine setup wizard now allows you to select the location of the created VM;
• When working with drives, the fallocate call was used to proactively reserve blocks, which made it possible to increase the speed of creating disk images of a fixed size;
• Implemented NVMHCI-compatible controller solid state drives(NVM Express, Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface);
• Increased productivity network driver E1000;
• Numerous improvements to EFI support, including USB boot capability;
• Improved processing of images in OVF (Open Virtualization Format) format, certified with a digital signature;
• DKMS is no longer used to build the Linux kernel module.

VirtualBox 5.0.16

Among the most notable fixes:

• An issue leading to incorrect behavior of guest systems on computers with AMD CPUs has been fixed;
• The problem with GUI crash, which occurs under rather rare circumstances, has been resolved;
• For Linux, an experimental possibility of PC speaker forwarding has been introduced;
• Fixed several problems with xHCI USB controllers (for example, webcam forwarding did not work);
• Added support for cached authentication in Active Directory when a domain controller is unavailable to guest management tools;
• Problems with the operation of the /sbin/rcvboxdrv script on Linux hosts have been resolved;
• For Linux hosts, correct removal of Python scripts is ensured when performing the uninstall operation via the .run installer.

VirtualBox 5.1 Beta 1

The main upgraded features of Oracle VirtualBox 5.1 (the final version is expected no earlier than mid-August 2016):

• The hypervisor will implement APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) and I/O APIC; they will provide a performance boost under certain network conditions.
• The hypervisor will support paravirtualized guest OSes with the Hyper-V role for debugging.
• Improvements to working with MMIO, which gives a positive effect in terms of performance and reduces the overhead of virtualization.
• The GUI has moved to Qt5.
• The passive event listener API increases front-end performance and reduces response time during operations in the VirtualBox console.
• Improved Python 3 support.
• Many improvements in the GUI - for example, a redesigned session information window, a new virtual machine creation wizard and much more.
• For quick creation pre-allocated virtual disks use the fallocate function (if supported).
• Improved EFI support (booting from USB stick is possible).
• Improved handling of digitally signed OVF virtual module packets.
• The Linux installer no longer uses DKMS to build modules.

VirtualBox 5.0.24

The product includes eight fixes aimed at improving stability and eliminating regression changes. The most noticeable change is the rollback of the code to the old I/O-APIC implementation due to the identification of a series of regressive changes in the new code. As a result, some guests may experience a drop in I/O performance before the 5.0.20 release. As a workaround, it is recommended to disable GRO support for Linux guests.

Other changes:

• Addressing potential corruption of optimized VMDK images created in VMware products;
• Implementation of support for dynamic reconnection of input devices on hosts running OS X;
• Informing guest systems about changes in battery charge state through ACPI notifications;
• Solving problems when using host systems with the Linux 4.6 kernel;
• Resuming GUI functionality on Solaris 10 hosts.

2015

Beta testing of VirtualBox 5.0 has begun

The main change in it is the implementation of work in paravirtualization mode, which involves the use of a guest system modified for closer interaction with the hypervisor and using special drivers instead of hardware emulation. Working in paravirtualization mode makes it possible to significantly increase the performance of the guest system.

Screenshot of the paravirtualization manager window, 2015

Including changes:

• New modular audio architecture providing more high level abstractions regarding host system audio backends;
• Providing guest systems running using hardware virtualization mechanisms with the ability to use extended instruction sets, such as SSE 4.1, SSE4.2, AES-NI, POPCNT, RDRAND and RDSEED;
• The xHCI virtual controller now supports USB 3 devices;
• Support for drag"n"drop mode for Windows, Linux and Solaris guest systems;
• Ability to encrypt disk images;
• Added support for scaling guest screen output to the GUI, including when using 3D acceleration;
• New configurator section for customizing the menu and status bar;
• New tab for configuring disk image encryption settings;
• Ultra High Definition Display (HiDPI) support
• Possibility of hot plugging of SATA drives.

Oracle has released a release corrector for VirtualBox 4.3.28

Notable fixes

• Improved means of forwarding web cameras from Linux hosts (V4L2). Added support for new web camera models;
• Support for the upcoming Linux 4.1 kernel;
• Solving problems when working on systems with the Linux kernel 3.19 with the SMAP protection mode activated;
• Eliminate flickering when updating the mouse cursor when using add-ons for X11;
• The use of VNIC templates with network configurations on the Crossbow platform in Solaris has been established;
• Fixed crashes when shutting down Linux and restoring the X11 environment after hibernation when using 3D acceleration tools;
• VRDP has achieved compatibility with rdesktop 1.8.3, rdesktop-vrdp has been moved to version 1.8.3;
• Improved volume controls when emulating HD audio devices;
• Ensures correct application of bandwidth limitation when using NAT.

Oracle announced VirtualBox 5.0 Release Candidate 1

Screenshot of the application window, 2015

Among the most significant changes:

• improved support for monitors with high resolution(HiDPI)
• more efficient use of video memory, this expands the range of device support and optimizes performance
• Improved console interface, added smoother switching of elements
• support for localization interface languages ​​(NLS)
• the encryption process is displayed correctly
• support for hot adding USB controllers, now the controller type is visible in the VM settings
• hot plugging optical drives SATA
• many Guest Additions bug fixes
• improved Drag&Drop mechanism
• rdesktop-vrdp version 1.8.3
• fixed AHCI processing errors
• the Guest Additions heartbeat service is documented
• improved overall system stability

Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.0 released

On August 4, 2015, Oracle Corporation announced the availability for download of Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.0, an open (Open Source) cross-platform virtualization software.

Oracle VM VirtualBox runs on desktop and mobile PCs with x86 processors. Oracle VM VirtualBox allows the creation of multi-platform virtual machine environments for application development and testing, for virtualizing the operating system for universal purposes with the additional capability of dynamic encryption. Developers can create applications for cloud platforms like Docker and OpenStack directly in the Oracle VM VirtualBox virtual machine environment on their computers running Windows, Mac OS, Linux or Oracle Solaris, making it easier to develop multi-tier applications on a regular laptop.

Screenshot of the application window, 2014

Oracle VM VirtualBox helps you create and update virtual machines locally on your computers, including the operating system and applications, and then package them into a file standard format for distribution and deployment in the cloud in conjunction with Oracle VM Server or other server virtualization solutions. In addition, Oracle VM VirtualBox helps you run almost any x86 platform operating system to run applications that are not natively available to run on host systems.

Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.0 version supports the latest guest or host operating systems, including Mac OS X Yosemite, Windows 10, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux and other Linux distributions, as well as legacy operating systems.

Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.0 Additions:

• Paravirtualization support for Windows and Linux guest operating systems - Paravirtualization (the ability to run a modified guest OS without hardware virtualization) improves the performance of the guest operating system by using the built-in virtualization support in operating systems such as Oracle Linux 7 and Microsoft Windows 7 (and later versions).

• Optimized CPU Usage - The guest operating system is provided with an enhanced processor instruction set, allowing applications to leverage the latest hardware instruction sets for maximum performance.

• Support for USB 3.0 devices - Guest operating systems can directly recognize USB 3.0 devices and run them at the appropriate maximum speeds. The guest OS can be configured to support USB 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0.

• Support for bidirectional Drag and Drop for Windows - On all host platforms, Windows, Linux and Oracle Solaris guest operating systems now support Drag and Drop operations between the host and guest OS. The drag-and-drop feature allows you to transparently copy, open files, directories, etc.

• Disk image encryption - Data can be encrypted on virtual hard disk images in the background while programs are running; it uses the AES algorithm with 256-bit encryption keys (DEK). This helps ensure reliable protection data and allows encryption to be performed at any time, regardless of the inactivity or activity of the virtual machine on the developer’s computer or on the server.

VirtualBox 5.0.2 released

Among the most notable:

• Built-in support for systemd has been added to installation scripts for host and guest environments. Scripts for building kernel modules are now located in /sbin/rcvboxdrv (for the host) and /sbin/rcvboxadd (additions for guest systems);
• added support for OS X 10.11 "El Capitan";
• solved problems with compilation when using pre-releases of the Linux 4.3 kernel;
• Fixed problems in the installer that appeared in Linux From Scratch and systems with the “vanilla” Linux kernel;
• in additions for Linux guest systems, the correct saving of the VBoxService process identifier in the PID file has been adjusted;
• Problems with the operation of Guest Control tools when using add-ons for Linux guest systems have been resolved;
• a large portion of fixes specific to Windows and OS X guest systems, as well as when running VirtualBox in host mode on the Windows platform.

VirtualBox 5.0.10

The release includes 32 fixes aimed at improving stability and eliminating regressive changes. Among them:

• Compatibility with RHEL 7.2 is ensured;
• The problem with compatibility with .desktop files on Linux host systems has been resolved (the /usr/share/applications/virtualbox.desktop file was supplied incorrectly);
• the organization of recompilation of the kernel module has been changed (the launch of “/sbin/rcvboxdrv setup” has been ensured instead of /sbin/vboxconfig, which led to problems with activating the module on some systems);
• PCI device forwarding process has been improved on Linux hosts;
• Fixed a rare problem that, under certain circumstances, caused the virtual machine to freeze on Linux and OS X platforms;
• Bindings for Python 2.7 have been added for hosts on the Solaris platform;
• Linux fixed an issue with connecting a second monitor caused by the compiler removing code it thought was unused, which was not the case;
• in additions for guest systems with Linux, the names of directories mounted for sharing(previously "none" was displayed);
• in additions for guest systems with Linux, a workaround has been implemented to solve the problem with enabling the systemd service "vboxadd", which occurs when using SELinux;
• in the GUI, problems with scrolling when dragging elements outside the selection area have been resolved and cursor handling has been improved when selecting text with the mouse;
• Problems with XHCI controller emulation in software virtualization mode have been resolved;
• LBA64 support has been added to the BIOS implementation, making it possible to boot from very large hard drives.

2013

Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.3

Among the significant features of the new version is support for the 'scaling' mode, which allows you to proportionally reduce the size of the guest operating system window. The VirtualBox management interface has also been redesigned, which in the new version is called VirtualBox Manager. The new interface, in addition to service information, now contains screenshots reflecting the recent state of the guest operating system. The storage locations for program files have been changed, the amount of supported memory on 32-bit guest systems has been increased, and new virtual components have been added: Intel ICH9 chipset and Intel HD Audio. OVF support has also been improved, work with VDI and VHD images has been improved, support for multiple virtual screens has been added on Linux and Solaris guest systems, and bugs have been fixed.

In the fourth version, the program architecture has been redesigned: it now consists of basic package and extension sets. The main package is distributed under the GPLv2 license.

The new version of VirtualBox adds the ability to connect additional functional modules, including those distributed under proprietary licenses. So far, the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack plug-in has been announced, which will provide high speed when working with USB 2.0 services remote access to desktops and network boot. It is likely that in the future Oracle will develop other plug-ins that can be distributed for a fee.

Virtualization technologies in Lately are of great interest not only among large companies, which use them to improve the efficiency of information infrastructure as part of integrated solutions. End users have also seen the benefits of using desktop virtualization platforms both at work, in daily activities, and at home. The many options for using virtual machines, widely advertised by virtualization platform vendors, with the increasing power of consumer hardware platforms, are gradually beginning to be seriously considered by users as reliable tools for increasing the efficiency of working with various software and operating systems. Virtualization technologies allow you to simultaneously run several virtual machines with operating systems (guest OS) on one physical computer (host).

Moreover, if the virtualization platform is used as part of the work of an enterprise, the requirements for it are undoubtedly higher than the requirements for “home” virtual machines. If in a corporate environment the most important things are reliability, functionality, flexibility and the ability to integrate with existing infrastructure, then at home it is, first of all, the freeness of the platform itself, ease of use and performance. At home, virtual machines can be used for various purposes, the main ones being:

• Creation of “portable” isolated user environments with software installed in them, aimed at solving a certain range of tasks. For example, there is no need to overload the operating system of your home computer by installing various specific programs that are not used by other users. You can create a virtual machine with the necessary software (for example, design software) installed in it and launch it only as needed. At the same time, you can easily transfer it to another workstation and be sure that the registry, system files and host system settings will remain intact.
• Creating secure environments for accessing the Internet. If a Trojan horse or virus causes harm inside a virtual machine, you can delete this virtual machine and create a new one, while all data on the host system will be reliably protected.
• Experiment with different software and operating systems. The ability to simultaneously run multiple operating systems in virtual machines allows you to use different programs in the OS you need and ensure data transfer between them. Of course, virtual machines open up wide opportunities for learning both new operating systems and setting up various network services and protocols for interaction between different operating systems.

Of course, the options for using virtual machines at home don’t end there. Users are coming up with more and more new ways to use virtual machines, and also use various management tools and utilities to improve the usability of working with virtual machines. At the same time, virtualization platform manufacturers consider home users as a fairly promising market segment and are trying to make the deployment and use of virtual machines as simple as possible.

Overview of existing desktop virtualization platforms

It so happens that in the virtualization platform industry, users are accustomed to traditional products that develop over several years and provide the required level of functionality. However, the leader in virtualization software, VMware, focuses mainly on commercial use its platforms, and although its powerful platform virtualization VMware Workstation 6 is the best at the moment in many respects, it has one undeniable disadvantage - it is not free. Users can also download a free product from the site VMware Player, designed for “playing” virtual machines, but you cannot create them in it. Product VMware Server is aimed at use in a corporate environment for virtualizing small business servers and is also not suitable for home users.

Microsoft offers users a free product called Virtual PC, which, however, does not have the necessary functionality to meet the requirements of all categories of users. It should also be noted that Virtual PC is only available for workstations with Windows operating systems, which also excludes a certain segment of users.

Parallels also offers desktop virtualization platforms Parallels Workstation for Windows and Linux hosts, as well as Parallels Desktop for Mac OS X, which are also not free. In addition, due to the successful sales of the Parallels Desktop product, the Parallels company, by the way, owned by the Russian company SWsoft, somewhat suspended the development of the Parallels Workstation product and did not release its new versions for quite some time.

Thus, considering the market for popular desktop virtualization systems, we can say that there are either good, but paid platforms, or free, but insufficiently functional products that do not meet all user requirements, namely:

• cross-platform
• Supports most host and guest operating systems
• the ability to use convenient virtual machine management tools

It is worth noting that proponents of Open Source solutions would like to use a free and open source virtualization platform, such as the Xen platform.

For a long time, the virtualization platform market was in limbo regarding the home user segment: on the one hand, virtualization system manufacturers were increasing functionality and offering new management tools, on the other hand, end users did not want to pay for them. In this regard, some companies had to provide free virtualization systems (for example, VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server), which mainly covered the needs corporate users. But the question of using virtual machines at home still remained open.

In 2006, a new player appeared in the desktop virtualization platform market. The German company InnoTek presented the VirtualBox product for desktop virtualization with open source code, in the development of which (with the exception of some components) anyone can take part. VirtualBox is a worthy candidate to fill a void among desktop virtualization platforms.

About the VirtualBox platform

The platform is a desktop virtualization system for Windows, Linux and Mac OS hosts, supporting Windows, Linux, OS/2 Warp, OpenBSD and FreeBSD operating systems as guest operating systems. After several years of development, InnoTek released a limited version of the product as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in January 2007. Full version The closed source product is also available for free personal use. If the product will be used in a production environment, it is necessary to purchase licenses, the terms of which can be obtained from InnoTek. By the way, at the moment, InnoTek, in addition to the VirtualBox platform, is developing a new hypervisor-based virtualization platform, closely related to the Windows operating system, in collaboration with by Microsoft. Currently VirtualBox includes the following features:

• native x86 virtualization that does not require support for Intel VT or AMD-V hardware technologies (which, however, can be enabled in the settings)
• friendly user interface (built with Qt3)
• support for Windows, Linux and Mac OS host systems (the version for Mac OS is currently in beta)
• Availability of Guest VM Additions to simplify interaction with host operating systems and optimize their performance
• support for multiprocessor and multicore systems (guest only, no support for virtual SMP to represent multiprocessor in guests)
• stability (compared to other Open Source solutions)
• audio device virtualization support
• high performance (according to many experts, higher than that of VMware products)
• support various types network interaction (NAT, Host Networking via Bridged, Internal)
• support for a tree of saved virtual machine states (snapshots), which can be rolled back from any state of the guest system
• description of virtual machine settings in XML format
• Shared Folders support for easy file sharing between host and guest systems

Emulated hardware environment

VirtualBox emulates the following hardware components in a virtual machine:

• hard drives are emulated in a special VDI (Virtual Disk Images) container format, which is currently not compatible with virtual disk formats from other manufacturers
• The video adapter is emulated as a standard VESA with 8 MB of video memory, while installing Guest VM Additions (for Windows and Linux hosts only) allows you to increase the performance of the virtual video adapter and dynamically change the size of the virtual machine window
• audio controller on Intel based ICH AC"97
• the network adapter is emulated as an AMD PCNet interface
• The closed-source edition also emulates USB controllers, with USB devices inserted into the host connectors being automatically picked up by the guest system. Also, if the virtual machine acts as an RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) server, then USB devices will also be visible in the client

The VirtualBox platform executes guest code natively (directly transferring instructions to the host processor). This approach works well for code running in the third guest ring; guest code running in ring zero that requires privileged instructions needs to be intercepted by the virtualization platform. For this purpose, VirtualBox uses an original approach: code executed in the zero ring of the guest system is executed in the first ring of the host system, which is not used in the Intel architecture.

Unique VirtualBox Features

Besides standard features, inherent in most desktop virtualization systems, the VirtualBox platform also has a set of unique features unique to it:

• Clearly expressed modularity of the system
  The VirtualBox platform has a modular architecture with well-described components and provides convenient interfaces for accessing virtual machines that allow you to control guest systems both through the GUI and through the command line and remotely. In addition, InnoTek provides an excellent Software Development Kit, and since the platform is open source, no additional effort is required to write an extension to the system. At the moment, a lot of work is underway to port the product to various hosting platforms and developers are provided with all the necessary tools and interfaces for finalizing VirtualBox.
• The virtual machine can act as an RDP server
  Unlike other virtualization platforms, VirtualBox can act as an RDP server and be managed by any client that supports RDP protocol. The USB over RDP function is also supported. It is worth noting that VMware also provides the Act as RDP Server function in the recently released VMware Workstation 6 platform, so this VirtualBox function cannot be called so unique at the moment.
• iSCSI initiator
  The iSCSI initiator component is one of the closed parts of the VirtualBox platform. It allows you to use external devices using the iSCSI protocol as virtual disks in the guest system without additional support from the guest OS side.

Supported Guest and Host Systems

InnoTek and independent developers taking part in the development of the VirtualBox platform are constantly expanding the list of supported guest and host systems. Currently the product supports the following host operating systems:

• Operating systems of the Windows family (2000/XP/2003/Vista)
• Linux platforms including:
  • Ubuntu 7.04 (“Feisty Fawn”)
  • Ubuntu 6.10 ("Edgy Eft")
  • Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (“Dapper Drake”)
  • Debian 3.1 ("Sarge")
  • Debian 4.0 ("Etch")
  • openSUSE 10.2
  • Mandriva Linux 2007.1
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
  • Univention Corporate Server 1.3-2
• Mac OS X (currently in beta)
• OS/2 Warp (experimental)

It should be noted that at the moment the porting of VirtualBox to the OS/2 platform has not yet been completed, and the developer’s website contains only general instructions for assembling the system. When using VirtualBox on this platform, there are numerous problems that developers must solve.

The list of guests supported by VirtualBox is very extensive and can easily compete with commercial virtualization platforms. The following guest operating systems are currently supported:

InnoTek also states that almost all Linux operating systems with kernel versions 2.4 and 2.6 should work as guests. For best performance, kernel version 2.6.13 is recommended.

As you can see from the list above, many Linux platforms are supported, which provides ample opportunities for learning to work with them in virtual machines based on VirtualBox.

How VirtualBox works

The VirtualBox GUI has two main windows: the main window and the virtual machine console.

When a VirtualBox virtual machine starts, three processes are usually launched, which can be observed in the task manager on Windows systems or the Linux system monitor:

1. Graphical interface of the control window.
2. Another similar process started with the startvm parameter, which means the GUI will act as a wrapper for the virtual machine.
3. Automatically created VBoxSVC service process required to track the number and status of running virtual machines (since they can be started different ways).

A virtual machine with a guest system running in it encapsulates the necessary implementation details of the guest OS and behaves in relation to the host system as a normal application.

In the guest system, the VirtualBox virtual machine implementation is presented to the user in two ways:

• Standard client-server architecture, which allows you to control the behavior of virtual machines in various ways using the COM/XPCOM API. For example, a guest system can be started via the GUI and stopped using the utility command line VboxManage. This utility may also perform some functions that are not available from GUI user.
• Frontend/backend architecture, which is an encapsulation of x86 virtualization in the VBoxVMM.dll libraries on Windows platform and VBoxVMM.so on Linux (backend) and implementation of virtual machine management in several ways (frontend):
  • Custom GUI based on Qt
  • VboxManage utility
  • GUI based on SDL, which has more capabilities than the Qt GUI and is aimed at using virtual machines in a production environment
  • Ability to manage virtual machines using the built-in RDP server in the virtual machine

The process of installing a guest system on the VirtualBox platform is very simple and does not require additional effort from the user. When creating a virtual machine, you must select the type of guest system to install, determine the amount of RAM allocated to it, and create a virtual disk that is either fixed in size or dynamically expanding as it becomes full in the guest system. The further installation process is the same as in other virtualization platforms. After the guest OS is installed, you must also install Guest VM Additions in order to optimize the guest system and improve its interaction with the host OS.

Network communication between virtual machines in VirtualBox can be of three types:

• NAT
  The virtual machine “hides” behind the host’s NAT server and can initiate connections to a network external to it, but it is impossible to initiate a connection to such a virtual machine from an external network.
• Host Interface Networking
  In this case, the virtual machine shares the resources of the physical adapter with the host operating system and is accessible from the external network as an independent computer.
• Internal Networking
  A type of network interaction for building a virtual network within the host, when there is no need to exit the virtual machine to an external network and access it from the outside.

Communication between the virtual machine emulator QEMU and VirtualBox

InnoTek, which has been developing the VirtualBox platform for several years, relied in its developments on one of the oldest virtual machine emulators, QEMU. The VirtualBox project is related to this platform in two ways:

• on the one hand, when creating emulated devices, InnoTek focused on representations of virtual equipment in QEMU,
• on the other hand, InnoTek, in collaboration with the creators of QEMU, used the recompilation mechanism as an exception handler when the Virtual Machine Monitor of the VirtualBox platform cannot correctly handle the exception when executing guest code in real mode.

According to the VirtualBox developers, the techniques they borrowed from QEMU allowed them to save a significant amount of time and increase the reliability of the platform.

VirtualBox Open Development Features

In addition to full-featured versions of VirtualBox for free use, InnoTek offers limited open source versions of the platform for various host systems. The VirtualBox source code is stored in the Subversion (svn) version control system and can be downloaded from the InnoTek website. To extract the platform source code from the online Subversion server, on a Linux operating system you need to run the command: svn co http://virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/trunk vbox

Also, the latest version of the VirtualBox system source codes can be downloaded in a single archive from the downloads page at: .

InnoTek also maintains a public bug tracker on its website, where you can find out about all the problems currently present and create an error report by entering a description of the problem when working with the platform into the VirtualBox error database.

And, of course, everyone can take part in the development open version platform by becoming part of the Open Source community on the website.

Advantages and disadvantages of VirtualBox

Having considered the main features of VirtualBox, we can say that this virtualization platform definitely has a future, since it is ready to fill an empty niche in the field of desktop virtualization systems as a powerful, productive, convenient and, most importantly, free platform. The undoubted advantage of the system is its cross-platform and support from the Open Source community. The large list of supported guest and host operating systems opens up wide possibilities for using VirtualBox in the context of various use cases.

Among the free platforms, VirtualBox is definitely one of the best at the moment. At the same time, InnoTek focuses not only on end users. The presence of features such as an RDP server and iSCSI initiator suggests that the platform can be seriously used in a production environment in the future. The friendly user interface coupled with high performance VirtualBox now has many adherents all over the world.

Meanwhile, VirtualBox also has some problems: first of all, these are stability problems on many host platforms and the lack of compatibility of the virtual disk format with other virtualization systems. Also, at the moment, the functionality of the system is inferior to commercial platforms (in particular, VMware Workstation 6), but the pace of development of VirtualBox suggests that its functionality will soon increase significantly. Try using VirtualBox virtual machines, and perhaps this platform will take its rightful place among the necessary software on your desktop.

VirtualBox- Very useful program to create virtual machines. With this machine you can easily perform a wide range of tasks. For example, when you need to test a program and you don't want to have to completely reinstall your operating system after a failed test. Or the second option. You teach courses on PC training. And so that no one breaks your operating system, you can use a virtual machine. When creating such a computer, you will need to indicate how much memory, processor cores and how much hard drive will use your virtual computer. Program VirtualBox allows you to create an unlimited number of computers, if, of course, your system resources allow you to work with a large number of machines simultaneously. In addition, virtual machines can be easily transferred to another computer, since they are designed as separate modules. Another feature of VirtualBox is that it is open source. This means that it can be easily modified and customized according to your wishes and needs.

- It is possible to choose an installation or portable version.
- Ability to install almost any operating system on a virtual computer.
- Support for an unlimited number of virtual machines.
- Easy transfer of a virtual computer from one machine to another.
- The program can be installed on almost any operating system.
- A very wide range of work with virtual computers.
- Virtual computers support USB.
- The virtual and physical machines are not connected in any way.
- The ability to connect virtual machines with physical ones into a common network and exchange data, files, etc. between them.
- If you do not link the physical and virtual machines, then the transmission of viruses from one computer to another is completely excluded.
- There is support for the Russian language.

Disadvantages of the program