Virtual Machine Hardware Profile: Sun VirtualBox 1.6.2 (Closed Source Edition)

VirtualBox 1.6.2 is a growing product, produced by Innotek, a company which was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems. The platform is possibly the widest range of supported host platforms, from the Mac OS, OpenSolaris, Linux and Windows. Most other desktop virtualization products tend to only support 2 or 3 different platforms.

VirtualBox 1.6.2 can be downloaded directly from Sun at: Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.2
Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6
VirtualBox-1.6.2-Win_amd64.msi 26.12 MB

System Requirements
* Reasonably powerful x86 hardware. Any recent Intel or AMD processor should do.

* Memory. Depending on what guest operating systems you want to run, you will need at least 512 MB of RAM (but probably more, and the more the better). Basically, you will need whatever your host operating system needs to run comfortably, plus the amount that the guest operating system needs. So, if you want to run Windows XP on Windows XP, you probably won’t enjoy the experience much with less than 1 GB of RAM. If you want to try out Windows Vista in a guest, it will refuse to install if it is given less than 512 MB RAM, so you’ll need that for the guest alone, plus the memory your operating system normally needs.

* Hard disk space. While VirtualBox itself is very lean (a typical installation will only need about 30 MB of hard disk space), the virtual machines will require fairly huge files on disk to represent their own hard disk storage. So, to install Windows XP, for example, you will need a file that will easily grow to several GB in size.

* A supported host operating system. Presently, we support Windows (primarily XP) and many Linux distributions on 32-bit hosts and on 64-bit hosts. Support for Mac OS X is currently in the works (note also the last Mac OS X Beta).

* A supported guest operating system. Besides the user manual (see below), up-to-date information is available at “Status: Guest OSes”.

Guest Addition Notes:

With the addition of the Guest Additions the following changes happen:

• The video card changes from “None detected” to “VirtualBox Graphics Adapter [Display adapter] on Default Monitor”
• Need the driver for the Intel® PRO/1000 MT Server Adapter card, as they are NOT included with the Guest Additions: Visit Intel® PRO/1000 MT Server Adapter Network Adapter Drivers for Windows* 2000, Windows* XP

Over the next few days I will be releasing the profiles of some very popular virtualization platforms, including: VMware server, Parallels Workstation, Virtual PC, and VirtualBox.

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