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Our Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion shootout took a deep dive into the two most successful commercial virtualization products for the Mac, but many of you had questions about VirtualBox, the free and open source desktop virtualization software currently offered by Oracle. Both Parallels and VMware offer plenty of features for home and business users, but is VirtualBox an acceptable alternative for the cash-strapped? IS VIRTUALBOX FREE SOFTWARE

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The focus of this article, as it was in our VMware and Parallels comparison, will be on running Windows 7 and Windows 8 guests on an OS X host, but VirtualBox's cross-platform nature means that many of the observations made in this article will also apply to VirtualBox running on Windows and Linux hosts.

One of the only differences is that OS X virtual machines, which are still labeled as an experimental feature in the current version of the software, are officially supported only within OS X hosts, both because of Apple's licensing stipulations and because OS X won't run on all of the CPUs that Windows and Linux can use.įor this article, I have attempted to evaluate VirtualBox both on its own merits and based on the criteria we laid out in our Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion shootout. I used a 2011 iMac with OS X 10.8.2 installed, and tested 64-bit versions of both Windows 7 and Windows 8 running in VirtualBox 4.2.1. The VirtualBox Guest Additions add mouse pointer integration, rudimentary 3D support, and other features to your guest operating system. VirtualBox includes a few basic features to enable communication with the host OS: the host's filesystem can be made available to the VM using VirtualBox's "shared folders" feature-add a folder from the host operating system here, and it will appear to the guest system as a networked drive.

Shared folders - like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, Oracle VM VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as "shared folders", which can then be accessed from within virtual machines.Sharing the clipboard between the host and guest operating systems for the purposes of copying and pasting is also possible if it's enabled, though it's disabled by default.

This way, a powerful server machine can virtualize many thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in.

USB over RDP - with this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices connected to the RDP client.

A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to "run" the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data.

Remote Desktop Protocol - unlike any other virtualization software, Oracle VM VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

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Virtual USB Controllers - Oracle VM VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without installing device-specific drivers on the host.

Virtual machine definitions can, therefore, easily be ported to other computers.

Virtual machine descriptions in XML - the configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines.

#IS VIRTUALBOX FREE FULL#

Oracle VM VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don't have to hack the source to write a new interface for Oracle VM VirtualBox. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely.

Modularity - Oracle VM VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design.