VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software. VirtualBox is a powerful virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use.
VirtualBox provides are useful for several scenarios: Running multiple operating systems simultaneously. VirtualBox allows you to run more than one operating system at a time. This way, you can run software written for one operating system on another (for example, Windows software on Linux or a Mac) without having to reboot to use it.
Since you can configure what kinds of “virtual” hardware should be presented to each such operating system, you can install an old operating system such as DOS or OS/2 even if your real computer’s hardware is no longer supported by that operating system.
Software vendors can use virtual machines to ship entire software configurations. For example, installing a complete mail server solution on a real machine can be a tedious task. With VirtualBox, such a complex setup (then often called an “appliance”) can be packed into a virtual machine. Installing and running a mail server becomes as easy as importing such an appliance into VirtualBox.
Testing and disaster recovery.
Once installed, a virtual machine and its virtual hard disks can be considered a “container” that can be arbitrarily frozen, woken up, copied, backed up, and transported between hosts. On top of that, with the use of another VirtualBox feature called “snapshots”, one can save a particular state of a virtual machine and revert back to that state, if necessary. This way, one can freely experiment with a computing environment.
If something goes wrong (e.g. after installing misbehaving software or infecting the guest with a virus), one can easily switch back to a previous snapshot and avoid the need of frequent backups and restores. Any number of snapshots can be created, allowing you to travel back and forward in virtual machine time. You can delete snapshots while a VM is running to reclaim disk space.
Supported OS: Windows Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, Windows 10 (32-bit and 64-bit).
Mac OS X hosts (64-bits): 10.9 (Mavericks), 10.10 (Yosemite), 10.11 (El Capitan), 10.12 (Sierra).
Linux hosts (32-bit and 64-bit): Ubuntu 12.04 to 16.10, Debian GNU/Linux 7 (“Wheezy”) and 8 (“Jessie”), Oracle Enterprise Linux 5, Oracle Linux 6 and 7, Redhat Enterprise Linux 5, 6 and 7, Fedora Core / Fedora 6 to 25, Gentoo Linux, openSUSE 11.4 to 13.2.
VirtualBox 7.0.16 (released April 16 2024)
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
VMM: Fixed a guru meditation executing nested-guests using the KVM hypervisor in the guest on Intel hosts (bug #21805)
VMM: Fixed Linux VM crash on some recent AMD models
USB: Fixed issue when EHCI controller was mishandling short packets (bug #20726)
Audio: Introduced general improvements
VBoxManage and vboximg-mount: Updated usage information and documentation (bugs #21895, #21992 and #21993)
Guest Control: Fixed starting Windows guest processes in the correct Windows session (7.0 regression)
Linux Host: Fixed issue when VBox.sh was deleting wrong VBoxSVC IPC socket when VM was started using sudo (bug #20928)
Linux Host: Fixed kernel modules build failure when using GCC 13.2
macOS Host: Fixed issue when App Nap was affecting VM performance (bug #18678)
Linux Host and Guest: Added fixes related to UBSAN warnings discovered on recent Linux distributions (bug #21877)
Linux Host and Guest: Added possibility to prevent kernel module from automatic loading during system boot by adding mod_name.disabled=1 into kernel command line
Linux Host and Guest: Added initial support for kernel 6.9 (bug #22033)
Linux Host and Guest: Fixed mk_pte warning introduced in kernel 6.6 (bug #21898)
Linux Guest Additions: Added initial support for kernel 6.8
Windows Guest Additions: Introduced general improvements in graphics area