VirtualBox is an application installed on an existing host operating system; within this application, additional operating systems can be loaded and run, each with its own virtual e... More

VirtualBox is an application installed on an existing host operating system; within this application, additional operating systems can be loaded and run, each with its own virtual environment. For example, several Linux distributions can be hosted on a single machine running Windows XP; likewise, XP and Vista can run on a machine running Linux, and so on. There is a free for personal or evaluation use proprietary version and a GNU General Public License (GPL) version. It is a X86 virtualization software package originally developed by German software company innotek GmbH, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems. Supported host operating systems include Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp (experimental OSE builds), Windows, and OpenSolaris. Supported guest operating systems include FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, OS/2 Warp, Windows and Solaris. The package was initially offered under a proprietary software license (free only for private use). In January 2007, after several years of development, VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition), an open source version, was released under GPL. Compared with other established commercial virtualization software such as VMware Workstation and Microsoft Virtual PC, VirtualBox lacks some features, but in turn provides others such as running virtual machines remotely over the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), iSCSI support and USB support with remote devices over RDP. VirtualBox supports Intel's hardware virtualization VT-x and has experimental support for AMD's AMD-V, but does not use either of them by default. According to a 2007 survey by DesktopLinux.com, VirtualBox is the third most popular software package for running Windows programs on Linux desktops.  [edit]  Less