Virtualbox which host os

Most commonly, you will select this option when installing an OS from an ISO file that you have obtained from the Internet. For example, most Linux distributions are available in this way. Depending on the type of disk image, you can set the following Attributes for the disk image in the right part of the Storage settings page:. The device slot of the controller that the virtual disk is connected to. IDE controllers have four slots: primary device 0, primary device 1, secondary device 0, and secondary device 1.

Solid-state Drive presents a virtual disk to the guest as a solid-state device. Hot-pluggable presents a virtual disk to the guest as a hot-pluggable device. This means that the virtual optical disk is not removed from when the guest system ejects it. To remove an attachment , either select it and click on the Remove icon at the bottom, or right-click on it and select the menu item.

Since the Settings dialog is not available at that time, you can also access these settings from the Devices menu of your virtual machine window. The Audio section in a virtual machine's Settings window determines whether the VM will detect a connected sound card, and if the audio output should be played on the host system.

To enable audio for a guest, select the Enable Audio check box. The following settings are available:. On newer Linux distributions, the PulseAudio subsystem is preferred. The Network section in a virtual machine's Settings window enables you to configure how Oracle VM VirtualBox presents virtual network cards to your VM, and how they operate.

This way the guest can connect to the outside world using the host's networking and the outside world can connect to services on the guest which you choose to make visible outside of the virtual machine. It supports many virtual network cards per virtual machine. The first four virtual network cards can be configured in detail in the VirtualBox Manager window. Additional network cards can be configured using the VBoxManage command.

Many networking options are available. See Chapter 6, Virtual Networking for more information. Serial ports were commonly used with modems, and some computer mice used to be connected to serial ports before USB became commonplace.

While serial ports are no longer as common as they used to be, there are still some important uses left for them. For example, serial ports can be used to set up a primitive network over a null-modem cable, in case Ethernet is not available.

Also, serial ports are indispensable for system programmers needing to do kernel debugging, since kernel debugging software usually interacts with developers over a serial port. With virtual serial ports, system programmers can do kernel debugging on a virtual machine instead of needing a real computer to connect to. Both receiving and transmitting data is supported.

How this virtual serial port is then connected to the host is configurable, and the details depend on your host OS. You can use either the Settings tabs or the VBoxManage command to set up virtual serial ports. For the latter, see Section 8. You can configure up to four virtual serial ports per virtual machine. For each device, you must set the following:.

Port Number: This determines the serial port that the virtual machine should see. For best results, use the traditional values as follows:. You can also configure a user-defined serial port.

Port Mode: What the virtual port is connected to. For each virtual serial port, you have the following options:. Disconnected: The guest will see the device, but it will behave as if no cable had been connected to it.

Host Device: Connects the virtual serial port to a physical serial port on your host. On a Windows host, this will be a name like COM1. Oracle VM VirtualBox will then simply redirect all data received from and sent to the virtual serial port to the physical device.

This depends on your host OS, as follows:. On a Windows host, data will be sent and received through a named pipe. The socket filename must be chosen such that the user running Oracle VM VirtualBox has sufficient privileges to create and write to it. On Linux there are various tools which can connect to a local domain socket or create one in server mode. The most flexible tool is socat and is available as part of many distributions.

In this case, you can configure whether Oracle VM VirtualBox should create the named pipe, or the local domain socket non-Windows hosts, itself or whether Oracle VM VirtualBox should assume that the pipe or socket exists already. With the VBoxManage command-line options, this is referred to as server mode or client mode, respectively. For a direct connection between two virtual machines, corresponding to a null-modem cable, simply configure one VM to create a pipe or socket and another to attach to it.

Raw File: Send the virtual serial port output to a file. This option is very useful for capturing diagnostic output from a guest. Any file may be used for this purpose, as long as the user running Oracle VM VirtualBox has sufficient privileges to create and write to the file.

This option enables a remote machine to directly connect to the guest's serial port using TCP. This is typically 23 or Note that on UNIX-like systems you will have to use a port a number greater than for regular users. Up to four serial ports can be configured per virtual machine, but you can pick any port numbers out of the above.

However, serial ports cannot reliably share interrupts. As soon as the guest system starts using a USB device, it will appear as unavailable on the host. Be careful with USB devices that are currently in use on the host. For example, if you allow your guest to connect to your USB hard disk that is currently mounted on the host, when the guest is activated, it will be disconnected from the host without a proper shutdown.

This may cause data loss. Oracle Solaris hosts have a few known limitations regarding USB support. See Section 7. For this, you can create filters by specifying certain properties of the USB device.

USB devices with a matching filter will be automatically passed to the guest once they are attached to the host. USB devices without a matching filter can be passed manually to the guest, for example by using the Devices , USB menu.

You can give the filter a name, for later reference, and specify the filter criteria. The more criteria you specify, the more precisely devices will be selected.

For instance, if you specify only a vendor ID of d, all devices produced by Logitech will be available to the guest. If you fill in all fields, on the other hand, the filter will only apply to a particular device model from a particular vendor, and not even to other devices of the same type with a different revision and serial number.

Vendor and Product ID. Similarly, each line of products is assigned a product ID number. Both numbers are commonly written in hexadecimal, and a colon separates the vendor from the product ID. Alternatively, you can also specify Manufacturer and Product by name. To list all the USB devices that are connected to your host machine with their respective vendor IDs and product IDs, use the following command:.

On Linux, you can use the lsusb command. Serial Number. While vendor ID and product ID are quite specific to identify USB devices, if you have two identical devices of the same brand and product line, you will also need their serial numbers to filter them out correctly. This setting specifies whether the device will be local only, remote only, such as over VRDP, or either. On a Windows host, you will need to unplug and reconnect a USB device to use it after creating a filter for it.

As an example, you could create a new USB filter and specify a vendor ID of d for Logitech, Inc, a manufacturer index of 1, and "not remote". Then any USB devices on the host system produced by Logitech, Inc with a manufacturer index of 1 will be visible to the guest system.

Several filters can select a single device. For example, a filter which selects all Logitech devices, and one which selects a particular webcam. You can deactivate filters without deleting them by deselecting the check box next to the filter name. On Windows hosts, a kernel mode device driver provides USB proxy support.

System reboots are not necessary after installing the driver. When Oracle VM VirtualBox is installed, these are made available to all users in the vboxusers system group.

In order to be able to access USB from guest systems, make sure that you are a member of this group. Shared folders enable you to easily exchange data between a virtual machine and your host. The User Interface section enables you to change certain aspects of the user interface of this VM.

Menu Bar: This widget enables you to disable menus by clicking on the menu to release it, menu entries by deselecting the check box of the entry to disable it and the complete menu bar by deselecting the rightmost check box. Mini ToolBar: In full screen or seamless mode, Oracle VM VirtualBox can display a small toolbar that contains some of the items that are normally available from the virtual machine's menu bar.

This toolbar reduces itself to a small gray line unless you move the mouse over it. With the toolbar, you can return from full screen or seamless mode, control machine execution or enable certain devices. If you do not want to see the toolbar, disable this setting. The second setting enables you to show the toolbar at the top of the screen, instead of showing it at the bottom.

Status Bar: This widget enables you to disable icons on the status bar by deselecting the check box of an icon to disable it, to rearrange icons by dragging and dropping the icon, and to disable the complete status bar by deselecting the leftmost check box.

Alternatively, use the VBoxManage command line interface as follows:. More recent Linux versions and Windows releases, starting with Vista, also offer special versions that can be booted using EFI. Oracle VM VirtualBox provides a configuration option to control the graphics resolution for both interfaces, making the difference mostly irrelevant for users. The default resolution is x Determine the horizontal resolution H and the vertical resolution V from the following list of default resolutions:.

If this list of default resolution does not cover your needs, see Section 9. Note that the color depth value specified in a custom video mode must be specified. Color depths of 8, 16, 24, and 32 are accepted. EFI assumes a color depth of 32 by default. It is currently not possible to manipulate EFI variables from within a running guest. For example, setting the boot-args variable by running the nvram tool in a Mac OS X guest will not work.

To change the boot-args EFI variable, use the following command:. Chapter 3. Configuring Virtual Machines. Table of Contents 3. Supported Guest Operating Systems 3. Mac OS X Guests 3. Unattended Guest Installation 3. An Example of Unattended Guest Installation 3. Emulated Hardware 3. General Settings 3. Basic Tab 3. Advanced Tab 3. Description Tab 3. Disk Encryption Tab 3.

Basic Ubuntu releases should have the correct packages installed by default. On Fedora, Red Hat, Oracle Linux and many other RPM-based systems, the kernel version sometimes has a code of letters or a word close to the end of the version name. For example "uek" for the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel or "default" or "desktop" for the standard kernels. In this case, the package name is kernel-uek-devel or equivalent. If there is no such code, it is usually kernel-devel.

If you suspect that something has gone wrong with module installation, check that your system is set up as described above and try running the following command, as root:. See your system documentation for details of the kernel module signing process. Oracle VM VirtualBox is available in a number of package formats native to various common Linux distributions.

See Section 1. In addition, there is an alternative generic installer. Download the appropriate package for your distribution. The following example assumes that you are installing to a bit Ubuntu Xenial system. Use dpkg to install the Debian package,as follows:. The installer will also try to build kernel modules suitable for the current running kernel. If the build process is not successful you will be shown a warning and the package will be left unconfigured.

You may have to install the appropriate Linux kernel headers, see Section 2. After correcting any problems, run the following command:. If a suitable kernel module was found in the package or the module was successfully built, the installation script will attempt to load that module. If this fails, please see Section Once Oracle VM VirtualBox has been successfully installed and configured, you can start it by clicking VirtualBox in your Start menu or from the command line.

See Section 2. Creates a new system group called vboxusers. The installer must be executed as root with either install or uninstall as the first parameter. For example:. Or if you do not have the sudo command available, run the following as root instead:.

Either use the OS user management tools or run the following command as root:. The usermod command of some older Linux distributions does not support the -a option, which adds the user to the given group without affecting membership of other groups. In this case, find out the current group memberships with the groups command and add all these groups in a comma-separated list to the command line after the -G option.

For example: usermod -G group1 , group2 ,vboxusers username. If you cannot use the shell script installer described in Section 2. Run the installer as follows:. This will unpack all the files needed for installation in the directory install under the current directory. To build the module, change to the directory and use the following command:. If everything builds correctly, run the following command to install the module to the appropriate module directory:.

In case you do not have sudo, switch the user account to root and run the following command:. The above make command will tell you how to create the device node, depending on your Linux system. On certain Linux distributions, you might experience difficulties building the module.

You will have to analyze the error messages from the build system to diagnose the cause of the problems. In general, make sure that the correct Linux kernel sources are used for the build process. Next, you install the system initialization script for the kernel module and activate the initialization script using the right method for your distribution, as follows:. The Debian packages will request some user feedback when installed for the first time.

The debconf system is used to perform this task. To prevent any user interaction during installation, default values can be defined.

A file vboxconf can contain the following debconf settings:. The first line enables compilation of the vboxdrv kernel module if no module was found for the current kernel. The second line enables the package to delete any old vboxdrv kernel modules compiled by previous installations. These default settings can be applied prior to the installation of the Oracle VM VirtualBox Debian package, as follows:.

In addition there are some common configuration options that can be set prior to the installation. The RPM format does not provide a configuration system comparable to the debconf system. To configure the installation process for. The automatic generation of the udev rule can be prevented with the following setting:. If the following line is specified, the package installer will not try to build the vboxdrv kernel module if no module fitting the current kernel was found.

The Linux installers create the system user group vboxusers during installation. A user can be made a member of the group vboxusers either by using the desktop user and group tools, or with the following command:.

These are symbolic links to VBox. The following detailed instructions should only be of interest if you wish to execute Oracle VM VirtualBox without installing it first. Looking for a powerful yet simple and affordable data protection solution? Now you can perform VMware vSphere backup , set up custom disaster recovery workflows, backup Office workloads and even test your Microsoft Hyper-V backups from one centralized web interface.

Once you have installed VirtualBox, open the application. You can see the graphical user interface of VirtualBox which is unified for all supported host operating systems. You can also use the command line interface and VBoxManage if needed. In the current example VirtualBox is set up on Windows Imagine that you need to evaluate Windows Server before making a decision — to buy or not to buy.

Version : Windows bit. If you are using the latest version of VirtualBox, Windows is available in the list of OS versions. Memory size : Set memory for the VM. You can add more memory later, after installing the guest OS a VM must be powered off to change the amount of memory. The name and file location for the virtual disk. Try not to use a system partition for storing virtual disks if possible. Storage on physical hard disk : Dynamically allocated or fixed size the analog of thin and thick provisioning in VMware.

Select the dynamically allocated option if you want to save disk space, as in this case, the size of your virtual disk is near zero right after creation, and grows after writing data to the virtual disk before reaching the maximum allocated size.

Virtual machine Tuning. The following sections are in this window. Disable a virtual floppy drive in the Motherboard tab. In the System tab, you can add more processors for the VM, configure acceleration, and select one of the two emulated chipsets. In the Screen tab, it is possible to set the video memory, monitor count, and scale factor as well as enabling 2D and 3D acceleration.

Capturing video is configured in the Video Capture tab. Add and remove virtual hard disks, virtual DVD drives, and disk controllers if needed. Now your ISO disc is displayed in the list of storage devices. Audio can be enabled or disabled; the host audio driver, audio controller and extended features can be selected. Virtual network adapters are configured in this section. The maximum number of virtual network adapters per VM is four.

When the NAT mode is selected, your VM is connected to the virtual router and can access the host, the network to which the host is connected and external networks that can be accessed by the host. If you deploy a single VM, which is not needed to be seen as a regular machine in your physical network, you can select the NAT mode for VM networking. If you want your VM to be fully representative in your physical network, use the Bridged mode. The model of the emulated virtual network adapter is selected from the drop-down menu.

You may set the MAC address manually if necessary. Configure Port Forwarding for accessing VMs that use the NAT network mode from the physical network your host machine is connected to if necessary. Serial Ports. Shared Folders. Shared folders are used for file exchange between host OS and guest OS. Normal Start. Opens a VM window and displays the video output of the VM in that window similarly as the output of the physical machine is displayed on a monitor. When you close the VM window, VirtualBox asks you what to do:.

Headless Start. Detachable start.