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 OPEN SOURCE FOR YOU 

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 JANUARY 2018 

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How To

installed inside a guest to improve its performance and 

extend the functionality. For instance, these allow us to 

share folders between the host and guest, and to drag and 

drop functionality.

Features of VirtualBox 

Let us discuss some important features of VirtualBox.

1) Portability: VirtualBox is highly portable. It is available 

on a wide range of platforms and its functionality remains 

identical on each of those platforms. It uses the same file 

and image format for VMs on all platforms. Because of 

this, a VM created on one platform can be easily migrated 

to another. In addition, VirtualBox supports the Open 

Virtualisation Format (OVF), which enables VM import 

and export functionality.

2) Commodity hardware: VirtualBox can be used on a CPU 

that doesn’t support hardware virtualisation instructions, 

like Intel’s VT-x or AMD-V.

3) Guest additions: As stated earlier, these software bundles are 

installed inside a guest, and enable advanced features like 

shared folders, seamless windows and 3D virtualisation.

4) Snapshot: VirtualBox allows the user to take consistent 

snapshots of the guest. It records the current state of the 

guest and stores it on disk. It allows the user to go back in 

time and revert the machine to an older configuration.

5) VM groups: VirtualBox allows the creation of a group 

of VMs and represents them as a single entity. We can 

perform various operations on that group like Start, Stop, 

Pause, Reset, and so on.

Getting started with VirtualBox

System requirements

VirtualBox runs as an application on the host machine and 

for it to work properly, the host must meet the following 

hardware and software requirements:

1) An Intel or AMD CPU

2) A 64-bit processor with hardware virtualisation is required 

to run 64-bit guests

3) 1GB of physical memory

4) Windows, OS X, Linux or Solaris host OS

Downloading and installation

To download VirtualBox, visit https://www.virtualbox.org/

wiki/Downloads link. It provides software packages for 

Windows, OS X, Linux and Solaris hosts. In this column I’ll be 

demonstrating VirtualBox on Mint Linux. Refer to the official 

documentation if you wish to install it on other platforms.

For Debian based Linux, it provides the ‘.deb’ package. 

Its format is virtualbox-xx_xx-yy-zz.deb where xx_xx-yy is 

the version and build number respectively and zz is the host 

OS’s name and platform. For instance, in case of a Debian 

based 64-bit host, the package name is virtualbox-5.2_5.2.0-

118431-Ubuntu-xenial_amd64.deb.

To begin installation, execute the command given below in a 

terminal and follow the on-screen instructions:

$ sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-5.2_5.2.0-118431-Ubuntu-xenial_amd64.
deb

Using VirtualBox

After successfully installing VirtualBox, let us get our hands dirty 

by first starting VirtualBox from the desktop environment. It will 

launch the VirtualBox manager window as shown in Figure 1.

This is the main window from which you can manage your 

VMs. It allows you to perform various actions on VMs like 

Create, Import, Start, Stop, Reset and so on. At this moment, 

we haven’t created any VMs; hence, the left pane is empty. 

Otherwise, a list of VMs are displayed there.

Creating a new VM 

Let us create a new VM from scratch. Follow the instructions 

given below to create a virtual environment for OS installation.

1) Click the ‘New’ button on the toolbar.

2) Enter the guest’s name, its type and version and click the 

‘Next’ button to continue.

3) Select the amount of memory to be allocated to the guest and 

click the ‘Next’ button.

4) From this window we can provide storage to the 

VM. It allows us to create a new virtual hard disk or 

use the existing one.

4a) To create a new virtual hard disk, select the ‘Create 

a virtual hard disk now’ option and click the ‘Create’ 

button.

4b) Select the VDI disk format and click on ‘Continue’.

4c) On this page, we can choose between a storage policy 

that is either dynamically allocated or a fixed size:

i) As the name suggests, a dynamically allocated disk will 

grow on demand up to the maximum provided size.

ii) A fixed size allocation will reserve the required storage 

upfront. If you are concerned about performance, then go 

with a fixed size allocation.

4d) Click the ‘Next’ button.

5) Provide the virtual hard disk’s name, location and size 

before clicking on the ‘Create’ button. 

This will show a newly created VM on the left pane as 

seen in Figure 2.

Figure 1: VirtualBox manager