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.
Changes in 6.1.34:
- VMM: Fix instruction emulation for “cmpxchg16b”
- GUI: Improved GUI behavior on macOS Big Sur and later when kernel extensions are not loaded
- EHCI: Addressed an issue with handling short packets (bug #20726)
- Storage: Fixed a potential hang during disk I/O when the host I/O cache is disabled (bug #20875)
- NVMe: Fixed loading saved state when nothing is attached to it (bug #20791)
- DevPcBios: Addressed an issue which resulted in rejecting the detected LCHS geometry when the head count was above 16
- virtio-scsi: Improvements
- E1000: Improve descriptor handling
- VBoxManage: Fixed handling of command line arguments with incomplete quotes (bug #20740)
- VBoxManage: Improved ‘natnetwork list’ output
- VBoxManage: NATNetwork: Provide an option (–ipv6-prefix) to set IPv6 prefix
- VBoxManage: NATNetwork: Provide an option (–ipv6-default) to advertise default IPv6 route (bug #20714)
- VBoxManage: Fix documentation of “usbdevsource add” (bug #20849)
- Networking: General improvements in IPv4 and IPv6 area (bug #20714)
- OVF Import: Allow users to specify a different storage controller and/or controller port for hard disks when importing a VM
- Unattended install: Improvements
- Shared Clipboard: Improved HTML clipboard handling for Windows host
- MacOS host: Fix handling of non-ASCII characters in the guest control functionality (bug #20792)
- Linux host and guest: Introduced initial support for kernel 5.17
- Solaris package: Fixes for API access from Python
- Solaris IPS package: Suppress dependency on libpython2.7.so.*
- Linux host and guest: Fixes for Linux kernel 5.14
- Linux Guest Additions: Fixed guest screen resize for older guests which are running libXrandr older than version 1.4
- Linux Guest Additions: Introduced initial support for RHEL 8.6 kernels (bug #20877)
- Windows guest: Make driver install smarter
- Solaris guest: Addressed an issue which prevented VBox GAs 6.1.30 or 6.1.32 from being removed in Solaris 10 guests (bug #20780)
- EFI: Fixed booting from FreeBSD ISO images (bug #19910)
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