VirtualBox

VirtualBox Tutorial: Virtualization Essentials

Course Overview

In this post, we feature a comprehensive VirtualBox Tutorial. Oracle VM VirtualBox is a free and open-source hypervisor for x86 computers from Oracle Corporation. VirtualBox may be installed on a number of host operating systems, including: Linux, OS X, Windows, Solaris, and OpenSolaris. There are also ports to FreeBSD and Genode.

It supports the creation and management of guest virtual machines running versions and derivations of Windows, Linux, BSD, OS/2, Solaris, Haiku, OSx86 and others, and limited virtualization of OS X guests on Apple hardware.

For some guest operating systems, a “Guest Additions” package of device drivers and system applications is available which typically improves performance, especially of graphics. (Source: Wikipedia)

In this course, we provide a compilation of VirtualBox tutorials that will help you get started with this virtualization platform. We cover a wide range of topics, from installing the software and performing a basic configuration, to cloning, exporting, importing, and removing virtual machines. With our straightforward tutorials, you will be able to get your own Virtual Machines up and running in minimum time.

About the Author

Gabriel’s areas of expertise and interest are Linux system administration, shell scripting, database administration (SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle 11g), object-oriented and procedural programming (Python and PHP), desktop applications (C#, Visual Basic, Excel with VBA) and web development (jQuery, HTML5, CSS3, PHP).

He has also been working as a Level-1 TSR (Technical Support Representative) supporting onsite the startup and ongoing operation of the WMS in a major multinational company, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle 11g as RDBMS.

Lessons

Virtualization with VirtualBox: Installation and Configuration

VirtualBox is a popular virtualization solution for both enterprise and personal use. In addition, it is distributed at no cost under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPL v2), and is available for 32 and 64-bit platforms. VirtualBox currently can run on Linux, Windows, Macintosh and Solaris hosts and supports a wide variety of operating systems as guests.

Cloning, exporting, importing, and removing virtual machines in VirtualBox

In the first part of this series, you learned how to create and start a virtual machine after installing VirtualBox on your system. As you will recall from that article, starting and stopping a virtual machine is analogous to pressing the Power button in a computer and shutting it down using the corresponding operating system menu, respectively.

How to create, restore, and delete virtual machine snapshots in VirtualBox

What happens if you need to have restore points of your virtual machines you can roll back to in case something goes wrong or does not work as expected while you are making changes (or deploying code, to name another example)? In this tutorial we will explain what snapshots are, how taking a snapshot and restoring it is different than exporting and importing the virtual machine, and give a few suggestions to consider in order to effectively use them in your daily tasks.

How to configure the settings of a Virtual Machine in VirtualBox

In previous tutorials you learned how to create virtual machines and perform several operations (clone, import, export, and delete) with them. We also advised you to become familiar with the logs of your appliances as they are a very useful troubleshooting tool. Let’s start by copying a few lines from the logs of the Windows 7 virtual machine we used as an example in Cloning, exporting, importing, and removing virtual machines in VirtualBox…

Managing VirtualBox Virtual Machines through Command Line (with VBoxManage)

In this article we will explain how to use VBoxManage, the command line alternative, to perform the same operations directly from the shell in your host machine. Among other things, this can prove useful when 1) you need to include your virtual machines in your backup routines, or if you want to perform a management operation through cron in Linux or the Task Scheduler in Windows.

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Gabriel Canepa

Gabriel Canepa is a Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS-1500-0576-0100) and web developer from Villa Mercedes, San Luis, Argentina. He works for a worldwide leading consumer product company and takes great pleasure in using FOSS tools to increase productivity in all areas of his daily work. When he's not typing commands or writing code or articles, he enjoys telling bedtime stories with his wife to his two little daughters and playing with them, the great pleasure of his life.
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Herbert Dupree, II
7 years ago

How to resolve conflicts with Hyper-V would be nice. VirtualBox has sound and webcam support that Hyper-V doesn’t have, but if it’s on the system, no one else can work. I even removed it, and my system went bonkers. I guess I am stuck with Hyper-V unless I downgrade to Win10Home or get another system and not add that feature. Pity.

Edd Twilbeck
Edd Twilbeck
6 years ago

Been looking for a tutorial just like this one, thanks!

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