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 7.2.8:

• VMM: Fixed issue which caused a Guru Meditation with VERR_IEM_IPE_4 if the guest was trying to execute the wrong hypercall instruction but injected a UD exception instead (github:gh-616)
• NAT Network: Fixed issue when internal DNS server could not be reached
• Graphics: Fixed issue when mouse cursor did not change shape by context in Ubuntu 25.10 / Wayland (github:gh-464)
• Main: Fixed crash on FreeBSD 16.0 shutdown with multiple devices attached to LSI Logic SAS controller (github:gh-538)
• IPRT: Merged Github pull request 503 (fix: infinite loop in vsscanf whitespace processing). github-merge-author: lachlanharrisdev
• Unattended: General improvements
• Linux Host: Added initial support for kernels 6.19 and 7.0 (github:gh-467, github:gh-623)
• Linux Host: Added support for guest time accounting (github:gh-2)
• Linux Host and Guest: Introduced additional fixes for RHEL 10.1 and 10.2 kernels (github:gh-455)
• Linux Host and Guest: Added support for UEK9 kernel on Oracle Linux 9
• Linux Host and Guest: Added improvements to make ‘rcvboxdrv/rcvboxadd setup’ and installation process faster
• Linux Guest Additions: Deprecated vboxvideo kernel module for kernels 7.0 and newer; please consider using VMSVGA graphics or vboxvideo module which comes with Linux kernel or provided by your Linux distribution if guest running kernel 7.0+; vboxvideo will still be available for older kernels
• Linux Guest Additions: Fixed issue when clipboard sharing was not possible in combination of Wayland guest and Windows host (github:gh-33)
• Linux Guest Additions: Fixed issue when last character was not pasted into Windows host clipboard when copying from Wayland guest (bug:22339)
• Windows Guest: Fixed issue when Windows 11 guest experienced BSOD – DRIVER_OVERRAN_STACK_BUFFER (github:gh-590)
• UEFI: Fixed errors with secure boot certificate updates and Windows 11 guests (github:gh-133)
• DMI: Fixed issue when 0.0 value was provided for the BIOS release and BIOS firmware version numbers so Windows did not populate the registry keys under HKLM\HARDWARE\System\BIOS which some components rely on (bug:21943)

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