Sun Microsystems VERSION 3.1.0_BETA2 - Manual

Contents 8.5.2 Networking settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 8.5.3 Serial port, audio, clipboard, VRDP and USB settings . . . . . . 117 8.6 VBoxManage import . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 8.7 VBoxManage export . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

Contents 9.13.2 Configuring the boot server (next server) of a NAT network in- terface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 9.13.3 Tuning TCP/IP buffers for NAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 9.13.4 Binding NAT sockets to a specific interface . . . . . . . ....

Contents 12.38Version 1.1.6 (2006-04-18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 12.39Version 1.1.4 (2006-03-09) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 12.40Version 1.1.2 (2006-02-03) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 12.41Version 1.0.50 (2005-12-16) ...

1 First steps Welcome to Sun VirtualBox! VirtualBox is a cross-platform virtualization application. What does that mean? For one thing, it installs on your existing Intel or AMD-based computers, whether they arerunning Windows, Mac, Linux or Solaris operating systems. Secondly, it extends thecapabil...

1 First steps You can find a summary of VirtualBox’s capabilities in chapter 1.3 , Features overview , page 12 . For existing VirtualBox users who just want to see what’s new in this release, there is a detailed list in chapter 12 , Change log , page 167 . 1.1 Why is virtualization useful? The techn...

1 First steps 1.3 Features overview Here’s a brief outline of VirtualBox’s main features: • Portability. VirtualBox runs on a large number of 32-bit and 64-bit host oper- ating systems (again, see chapter 1.4 , Supported host operating systems , page 14 for details). To a very large degree, VirtualB...

1 First steps – Hardware compatibility. VirtualBox virtualizes a vast array of virtual de- vices, among them many devices that are typically provided by other virtu-alization platforms. That includes IDE, SCSI and SATA hard disk controllers,several virtual network cards and sound cards, virtual seri...

1 First steps • Remote machine display. You can run any virtual machine in a special VirtualBox program that acts as a server for the VirtualBox Remote Desktop Pro-tocol (VRDP), a backward-compatible extension of the standard Remote Desk-top Protocol. With this unique feature, VirtualBox provides hi...

1 First steps – 10.6 (Snow Leopard, 32-bit and 64-bit) Intel hardware is required; please see chapter 13 , Known limitations , page 237 also. • Linux hosts (32-bit and 64-bit 3 ). Among others, this includes: – Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (“sarge”), 4.0 (“etch”) and 5.0 (“lenny”) – Fedora Core 4 to 11 – Ge...

1 First steps 1.6 Creating your first virtual machine Click on the “New” button at the top of the VirtualBox window. A wizard will pop upto guide you through setting up a new virtual machine (VM): 17

1 First steps On the following pages, the wizard will ask you for the bare minimum of informationthat is needed to create a VM, in particular: 1. A name for your VM, and the type of operating system (OS) you want to install. The name is what you will later see in the VirtualBox main window, and what...

1 First steps There are many and potentially complicated ways in which VirtualBox can pro-vide hard disk space to a VM (see chapter 5 , Virtual storage , page 76 for details), but the most common way is to use a large image file on your “real” hard disk,whose contents VirtualBox presents to your VM ...

1 First steps • A dynamically expanding file will only grow in size when the guest actu- ally stores data on its virtual hard disk. It will therefore initially be smallon the host hard drive and only later grow to the size specified as it is filledwith data. • A fixed-size file will immediately occu...

1 First steps 1.7 Running your virtual machine You will now see your new virtual machine in the list of virtual machines, at the left ofthe VirtualBox main window. To start the virtual machine, simply double-click on it,or select it and press the “Start” button at the top. This opens up a new window...

1 First steps In detail, all this translates into the following: • Your keyboard is owned by the VM if the VM window on your host desktop has the keyboard focus (and then, if you have many windows open in your guestoperating system as well, the window that has the focus in your VM). This meansthat i...

1 First steps The settings are the same as would be available for the VM in the “Settings” dialog of the VirtualBox main window, but since that dialog is disabled while the VM is in the“running” or “saved” state, this extra menu saves you from having to shut down andrestart the VM every time you wan...

1 First steps This is equivalent to pulling the power plug on a real computer without shuttingit down properly. If you start the machine again after powering it off, youroperating system will have to reboot completely and may begin a lengthy checkof its (virtual) system disks. As a result, this shou...

1 First steps current state of your VM is a variation based on the snapshot you took earlier.If you later take another snapshot, you will see that they will be displayed insequence, and each subsequent snapshot is a derivation of the earlier one: VirtualBox allows you to take an unlimited number of ...

1 First steps By restoring an earlier snapshot and taking more snapshots from there, it is evenpossible to create a kind of alternate reality and to switch between these differenthistories of the virtual machine. This can result in a whole tree of virtual machinesnapshots, as shown in the screenshot...

1 First steps 1.10 Deleting virtual machines To remove a virtual machine which you no longer need, right-click on it in the list ofvirtual machines in the main window and select “Delete” from the context menu thatcomes up. All settings for that machine will be lost. The “Delete” menu item is disable...

1 First steps If VirtualBox can handle the file, a dialog similar to the following will appear: This presents the virtual machines described in the OVF file and allows you to changethe virtual machine settings by double-clicking on the description items. Once youclick on “Import” , VirtualBox will c...

2 Installation details As installation of VirtualBox varies depending on your host operating system, we pro-vide installation instructions in four separate chapters for Windows, Mac OS X, Linuxand Solaris, respectively. 2.1 Installing on Windows hosts 2.1.1 Prerequisites For the various versions of ...

2 Installation details Networking This package contains extra networking drivers for your Windows host that VirtualBox needs to support Host Interface Networking (to make your VM’svirtual network cards accessible from other machines on your physical network). Depending on your Windows configuration,...

2 Installation details 2.2.2 Uninstallation To uninstall VirtualBox, open the disk image (dmg) file again and double-click on theuninstall icon contained therein. 2.2.3 Unattended installation To perform a non-interactive installation of VirtualBox you can use the command lineversion of the installe...

2 Installation details The VirtualBox kernel module is automatically installed on your system when you install VirtualBox. To maintain it with future kernel updates, for recent Linux distribu-tions – for example Fedora Core 5 and later, Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) and later and Man-driva 2007.1 and later –,...

2 Installation details 2. The kernel of your Linux host got updated. In that case, the kernel module will need to be reinstalled by executing (as root): /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup 2.3.3 USB and advanced networking support In order to use VirtualBox’s USB support, the user account under which you inte...

2 Installation details make install The VirtualBox kernel module needs a device node to operate. The above make command will tell you how to create the device node, depending on your Linux system.The procedure is slightly different for a classical Linux setup with a /dev directory, a system with the...

2 Installation details sudo ./VirtualBox.run uninstall or as root ./VirtualBox.run uninstall . Starting with version 2.2.2, you can uninstall the .run package by invoking /opt/VirtualBox/uninstall.sh To manually uninstall VirtualBox, simply undo the steps in the manual installation inreverse order. ...

2 Installation details 2.3.5 Starting VirtualBox on Linux The easiest way to start a VirtualBox program is by running the program of your choice( VirtualBox , VBoxManage , VBoxSDL or VBoxHeadless ) from a terminal. These are symbolic links to VBox.sh that start the required program for you. The foll...

2 Installation details To perform a non-interactive uninstallation, open a root terminal session and exe- cute: pkgrm -n -a /opt/VirtualBox/autoresponse SUNWvbox 2.4.5 Configuring a zone for running VirtualBox Starting with VirtualBox 1.6 it is possible to run VirtualBox from within Solariszones. Fo...

3 Configuring virtual machines Whereas chapter 1 , First steps , page 9 gave you a quick introduction to VirtualBox and how to get your first virtual machine running, the following chapter describe in detailhow to configure virtual machines. You have considerable latitude in deciding what virtual ha...

3 Configuring virtual machines Solaris 10, OpenSolaris Fully supported (32 bits and 64 bits). Guest Additions are available. FreeBSD Limited support. Guest Additions are not available yet. OpenBSD Versions 3.7 and later are supported. Guest Additions are not available yet. OS/2 Warp 4.5 Requires har...

3 Configuring virtual machines 3.3.3 “Description” tab Here you can enter any description for your virtual machine, if you want. This has noeffect of the functionality of the machine, but you may find this space useful to notedown things like the configuration of a virtual machine and the software t...

3 Configuring virtual machines Enable I/O APIC Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controllers (APICs) are a newer x86 hardware feature that have replaced old-style Programmable Interrupt Con-trollers (PICs) in recent years. With an I/O APIC, operating systems can use morethan 16 interrupt requests (IRQ...

3 Configuring virtual machines In addition, the “Enable PAE/NX” setting determines whether the PAE and NX capa- bilities of the host CPU will be exposed to the virtual machine. PAE stands for “PhysicalAddress Extension”. Normally, if enabled and supported by the operating system, theneven a 32-bit x...

3 Configuring virtual machines You can select for each virtual machine individually whether VirtualBox should use software or hardware virtualization. Prior to VirtualBox version 2.2, software virtu-alization was the default; starting with version 2.2, VirtualBox will enable hardwarevirtualization b...

3 Configuring virtual machines On AMD processors, nested paging has been available starting with theBarcelona (K10) architecture; Intel added support for nested paging, whichthey call “extended page tables” (EPT), with their Core i7 (Nehalem) processors. Nested paging is still disabled by default ev...

3 Configuring virtual machines In a real PC, so-called “storage controllers” connect physical disk drives to the rest of the computer. Similarly, VirtualBox presents virtual storage controllers to a virtualmachine. Under each controller, the virtual devices (hard disks, CD/DVD or floppydrives) are s...

3 Configuring virtual machines To remove a virtual disk or drive, select it and click on the “remove” icon at the bottom (or right-click on it and select the menu item). Removable media (CD/DVDs and floppies) can be changed while the guest is run- ning. Since the “Settings” dialog is not available a...

3 Configuring virtual machines Note: 1. Be careful with USB devices that are currently in use on the host! For example, if you allow your guest to connect to your USB hard disk thatis currently mounted on the host, when the guest is activated, it will bedisconnected from the host without a proper sh...

3 Configuring virtual machines 3. Remote. This setting specifies whether the device will be local only, or remote only (over VRDP), or either. On a Windows host, you will need to unplug and reconnect a USB device to use it after creating a filter for it. As an example, you could create a new USB fil...

4 Guest Additions The previous chapter covered getting started with VirtualBox and installing operatingsystems in a virtual machine. For any serious and interactive use, the VirtualBox GuestAdditions will make your life much easier by providing closer integration between hostand guest and improving ...

4 Guest Additions For Linux and Solaris guests, the Xorg server version 1.3 or later is required forautomatic resizing (the feature has been disabled on Fedora 9 guests due to abug in the X server they supply). The server version can be checked with Xorg -version . Finally, if the Guest Additions ar...

4 Guest Additions To disable this update check for the Guest Additions of a given virtual machine, set the value of its /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/CheckHostVersion guest property to 0 ; see chapter 4.11 , Guest properties , page 73 for details. 4.3 Windows Guest Additions The VirtualBox Windows Guest Addi...

4 Guest Additions 3. In the Virtual Disk Manager, press the “Add” button and browse your host file system for the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso file: • On a Windows host, you can find this file in the VirtualBox installationdirectory (usually under C:\Program files\Sun\xVM VirtualBox ). • On Mac OS X hosts...

4 Guest Additions Windows Guest Additions setup. Please consult chapter 4.3.4 , Manual file extraction , page 64 on how to achieve this. You will then find the AMD PCNet driver files in the x86\Network\AMD\netamd.inf subdirectory of the default install directory. Alternatively, change the Vista gues...

4 Guest Additions sudo apt-get install dkms Install DKMS before installing the Linux Guest Additions. 2. Mount the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso file as your Linux guest’s virtual CD- ROM drive, exactly the same way as described for a Windows guest in chapter 4.3.1.1 , Mounting the Additions ISO file , pag...

4 Guest Additions page 46 . You can also add your own modes to the X server configuration file. You simply need to add them to the “Modes” list in the “Display” subsection of the “Screen”section. For example, the section shown here has a custom 2048x800 resolution modeadded: Section "Screen"...

4 Guest Additions If in case the CD-ROM drive on the guest doesn’t get mounted (observed onsome versions of Solaris 10), execute as root: svcadm restart volfs 2. Change to the directory where your CD-ROM drive is mounted and execute as root: pkgadd -G -d ./VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg 3. Choose “1” and ...

4 Guest Additions 4.9 Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL and Direct3D 8/9) The VirtualBox Guest Additions contain experimental hardware 3D support for Win-dows, Linux and Solaris guests. 2 With this feature, if an application inside your virtual machine uses 3D features through the OpenGL or Direct3D ...

4 Guest Additions Technically, VirtualBox implements this by installing an additional hardware 3D driver inside your guest when the Guest Additions are installed. This driver acts asa hardware 3D driver and reports to the guest operating system that the (virtual)hardware is capable of 3D hardware ac...

4 Guest Additions timestamp: 1229098279885027000, flags: Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Components/VBoxGuest.sys, value: 3.1.0r40720, timestamp: 1229098279886838000, flags: Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Components/VBoxMouse.sys, value: 3.1.0r40720, timestamp: 1229098279890600000, flags: Name: /VirtualBox/G...

5 Virtual storage As the virtual machine will most probably expect to see a hard disk built into its virtualcomputer, VirtualBox must be able to present “real” storage to the guest as a virtualhard disk. There are presently three methods in which to achieve this: 1. Most commonly, VirtualBox will us...

5 Virtual storage machine. (By default, one of these four – the secondary master – is preconfiguredto be the machine’s virtual CD-ROM/DVD drive, but this can be changed. 2 ) So even if your guest operating system has no support for SCSI or SATA devices,it should always be able to see the default IDE...

5 Virtual storage Warning: The entire SATA controller and the virtual disks attached to it (in- cluding those in IDE compatibility mode) will not be seen by operating sys-tems that do not have device support for AHCI. In particular, there is no sup-port for AHCI in Windows before Windows Vista, so W...

5 Virtual storage 5.2 Disk image files (VDI, VMDK, VHD, HDD) Disk image files reside on the host system and are seen by the guest systems as harddisks of a certain geometry. When a guest operating system reads from or writes to ahard disk, VirtualBox redirects the request to the image file. Note tha...

5 Virtual storage 5.3 The Virtual Media Manager VirtualBox keeps an internal registry of all available hard disk, CD/DVD-ROM andfloppy disk images. This registry can be viewed and changed in the Virtual Media Manager , which you can access from the “File” menu in the VirtualBox main window: The wind...

5 Virtual storage • remove an image from the registry (and optionally delete the image file when doing so); • “release” an image, that is, detach it from a virtual machine if it is currently attached to one as a virtual hard disk. We recommend that you maintain two special folders on your system for...

5 Virtual storage While you can attach the same “normal” image to more than one virtual ma-chine, only one of these virtual machines attached to the same image file canbe executed simultaneously, as otherwise there would be conflicts if several ma-chines write to the same image file. 5 2. By contras...

5 Virtual storage taken a snapshot. Imagine you have accidentally infected your VM with a virus andwould like to go back to the snapshot. With a normal hard disk image, you simplyrevert the state of the VM, and the earlier state of your hard disk image will be restoredas well (and your virus infecti...

5 Virtual storage noticeable however since the tables with sector information are always kept in memoryand can be looked up quickly. Differencing images are used in the following situations: 1. Snapshots. When you create a snapshot, as explained in the previous section, VirtualBox “freezes” the imag...

5 Virtual storage 5.6 Cloning disk images You can duplicate hard disk image files on the same host to quickly produce a secondvirtual machine with the same operating system setup. However, you should only make copies of virtual disk images using the utility supplied with VirtualBox; see chapter 8.17...

5 Virtual storage 5.8 iSCSI servers iSCSI stands for “Internet SCSI” and is a standard that allows for using the SCSI proto-col over Internet (TCP/IP) connections. Especially with the advent of Gigabit Ethernet,it has become affordable to attach iSCSI storage servers simply as remote hard disksto a ...

6 Virtual networking As briefly mentioned in chapter 3.8 , Network settings , page 54 , VirtualBox provides up to eight virtual PCI Ethernet cards for each virtual machine. For each such card, youcan individually select 1. the hardware that will be virtualized as well as 2. the virtualization mode t...

6 Virtual networking VirtualBox has limited support for so-called jumbo frames , i.e. networking packets with more than 1500 bytes of data, provided that you use the Intel card virtualiza-tion and bridged networking. In other words, jumbo frames are not supported in NATmode or with the AMD networkin...

6 Virtual networking 6.3 Network Address Translation (NAT) Network Address Translation (NAT) is the simplest way of accessing an external net-work from a virtual machine. Usually, it does not require any configuration on thehost network and guest system. For this reason, it is the default networking...

6 Virtual networking use the same ports on the guest and on the host). You can use any ports on the hostwhich are not already in use by a service. An example of how to set up incoming NATconnections to an ssh server on the guest requires the following three commands: VBoxManage setextradata "Lin...

6 Virtual networking Protocols such as GRE are unsupported: Protocols other than TCP and UDP are not supported. This means some VPN products (e.g. PPTP from Microsoft) can-not be used. There are other VPN products which use simply TCP and UDP. Forwarding host ports < 1024 impossible: On Unix-base...

6 Virtual networking list at the bottom of the page, which contains the physical network interfaces of yoursystems. On a typical MacBook, for example, this will allow you to select between“en1: AirPort” (which is the wireless interface) and “en0: Ethernet”, which representsthe interface with a netwo...

7 Alternative front-ends; remote virtual machines 7.1 Introduction As briefly mentioned in chapter 1.3 , Features overview , page 12 , VirtualBox has a very flexible internal design that allows you to use different front-ends to control the samevirtual machines. To illustrate, you can, for example, ...

7 Alternative front-ends; remote virtual machines 7.2 Using VBoxManage to control virtual machines This section will give you a brief introduction to VBoxManage and how you can use itto create and operate virtual machines. In essence, VBoxManage supports everything that our graphical user interface ...

7 Alternative front-ends; remote virtual machines $ VBoxManage createvm --name "SUSE 10.2" --register VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.1.0 (C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Virtual machine ’SUSE 10.2’ is created. UUID: c89fc351-8ec6-4f02-a048-57f...

7 Alternative front-ends; remote virtual machines 7.4.1 Common third-party RDP viewers You can use any standard RDP viewer to connect to such a remote virtual machine(examples follow below). For this to work, you must specify the IP address of your host system (not of the virtual machine!) as the se...

7 Alternative front-ends; remote virtual machines To have the VRDP server use the setting from the VM configuration, as the other front-ends would, use this: VBoxHeadless --startvm <uuid|name> --vrdp=config 7.4.3 Step by step: creating a virtual machine on a headless server The following instr...

7 Alternative front-ends; remote virtual machines 7.4.6 RDP encryption RDP features data stream encryption, which is based on the RC4 symmetric cipher(with keys up to 128bit). The RC4 keys are being replaced in regular intervals (every4096 packets). RDP provides three different authentication method...

8 VBoxManage reference When running VBoxManage without parameters or when supplying an invalid com-mand line, the below syntax diagram will be shown. Note that the output will beslightly different depending on the host platform; when in doubt, check the output of VBoxManage for the commands availabl...

8 VBoxManage reference • systemproperties displays some global VirtualBox settings, such as mini- mum and maximum guest RAM and virtual hard disk size, folder settings andthe current authentication library in use. • hddbackends lists all known hdd backends of VirtualBox. Beside the name of the backe...

8 VBoxManage reference Storage Controller Type (1): I82078 IDE Controller (0, 0): /home/user/windows.vdi (UUID: 46f6e53a-4557-460a-9b95-68b0f17d744b) IDE Controller (0, 1): /home/user/openbsd-cd46.iso (UUID: 4335e162-59d3-4512-91d5-b63e94eebe0b) Floppy Controller 1 (0, 0): /home/user/floppy.img (UUI...

8 VBoxManage reference The --name <name> parameter is required and must specify the name of the machine. Since this name is used by default as the file name of the set- tings file (with the extension .xml ) and the machine folder (a subfolder of the .VirtualBox/Machines folder), it must confor...

8 VBoxManage reference • --audio none|null|oss : With this option, you can set whether the VM should have audio support. • --clipboard disabled|hosttoguest|guesttohost|bidirectional : With this setting, you can select whether the guest operating system’s clipboardshould be shared with the host; see ...

8 VBoxManage reference 8.7 VBoxManage export This command exports one or more virtual machines from VirtualBox into a virtualappliance in OVF format, including copying their virtual disk images to compressedVMDK. See chapter 1.11 , Importing and exporting virtual machines , page 29 for an introducti...

8 VBoxManage reference headless Starts a VM without a window for remote RDP display only. 8.9 VBoxManage controlvm The controlvm subcommand allows you to change the state of a virtual machine that is currently running. The following can be specified: • VBoxManage controlvm <vm> pause temporari...

8 VBoxManage reference • nic<1-N> null|nat|bridged|intnet|hostonly : With this, you can set, for each of the VM’s virtual network cards, what type of networking should beavailable. They can be not connected to the host ( null ), use network address translation ( nat ), bridged networking ( bri...

8 VBoxManage reference The take operation takes a snapshot of the current state of the virtual machine. You must supply a name for the snapshot and can optionally supply a description. Thenew snapshot is inserted into the snapshots tree as a child of the current snapshot andthen becomes the new curr...

8 VBoxManage reference storagectl Name of the storage controller. Mandatory. port Port number to which the medium has to be attached/detached/modified. Mandatory. device Device Number to which the medium has to be attached/detached/modified. Mandatory. type Define the type of the drive to which the ...

8 VBoxManage reference VBoxManage createhd --filename <filename> --size <megabytes> [--format VDI|VMDK|VHD] (default: VDI) [--variant Standard,Fixed,Split2G,Stream,ESX] [--type normal|writethrough] (default: normal) [--comment <comment>] [--remember] where the parameters mean: file...

8 VBoxManage reference In addition, the modifyhd --compact command can be used to compact disk im- ages, i.e. remove blocks that only contains zeroes. For this operation to be effective,it is required to zero out free space in the guest system using a suitable software tool.Microsoft provides the sd...

8 VBoxManage reference VBoxManage convertfromraw <filename> <outputfile> [--format VDI|VMDK|VHD] [--variant Standard,Fixed,Split2G,Stream,ESX] VBoxManage convertfromraw stdin <outputfile> <bytes> [--format VDI|VMDK|VHD] [--variant Standard,Fixed,Split2G,Stream,ESX] where the ...

8 VBoxManage reference lun Logical Unit Number of the target resource (optional). Often, this value is zero. username, password Username and password for target authentication, if required (optional). Note: Currently, username and password are stored without encryption (i.e. in cleartext) in the mac...

8 VBoxManage reference 8.21 VBoxManage setproperty This command is used to change global settings which affect the entire VirtualBoxinstallation. Some of these correspond to the settings in the “Global settings” dialog inthe graphical user interface. The following properties are available: hdfolder ...

8 VBoxManage reference When you modify a USB filter using usbfilter modify , you must specify the filter by index (see the output of VBoxManage list usbfilters to find global filter indexes and that of VBoxManage showvminfo to find indexes for individual machines) and by target, which is either a vi...

8 VBoxManage reference Subcommands may apply to all objects and metrics or can be limited to one object or/and a list of metrics. If no objects or metrics are given in the parameters, the sub-commands will apply to all available metrics of all objects. You may use an asterisk(“ * “) to explicitly sp...

8 VBoxManage reference • enumerate <vm> [-patterns <pattern>] : This lists all the guest prop- erties that are available for the given VM, including the value. This list will bevery limited if the guest’s service process cannot be contacted, e.g. because theVM is not running or the Guest...

9 Advanced topics 9.1 VirtualBox configuration data For each system user, VirtualBox stores configuration data in the user’s home directory,as per the conventions of the host operating system: • On Windows, this is %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\.VirtualBox ; typically something like C:\Documents and Setting...

9 Advanced topics 9.2 Automated Windows guest logons When Windows is running in a virtual machine, it might be desirable to perform co-ordinated and automated logons of guest operating systems using credentials from amaster logon system. (With “credentials”, we are referring to logon information con...

9 Advanced topics 1. For Windows XP guests, the logon subsystem needs to be configured to use the classic logon dialog as the VirtualBox GINA module does not support the XP-stylewelcome dialog. 2. For Windows Vista and Windows 7 guests, the logon subsystem does not sup- port the so-called Secure Att...

9 Advanced topics • /VirtualBox/HostGuest/SysprepRet holds the exit code of sysprep.exe after its run. • /VirtualBox/HostGuest/SysprepRC holds the return code of the whole system preparation process done by VBoxService.exe . The sysprep execution is a sub-service in VBoxService.exe which will be run...

9 Advanced topics • reverse the order of byte 6 and 7. Using this conversion you will get identical results when converting the binary UUIDto the string representation. The second arguments contains information about the guest authentication status. For the first call, it is always set to VRDPAuthGu...

9 Advanced topics Additions automatically provide the reduced video modes. Additionally, the VESABIOS has been adjusted to duplicate its standard mode table with adjusted resolutions.The adjusted mode IDs can be calculated using the following formula: reduced_modeid = modeid + 0x30 For example, in o...

9 Advanced topics 9.7 Multiple monitors for the guest VirtualBox allows the guest to use multiple virtual monitors. Up to sixty-four virtualmonitors are supported. Note: 1. Multiple monitors currently work only with Windows XP guests, and Guest Additions must be installed, as the implementation resi...

9 Advanced topics to the VBoxSDL main thread (first entry in the ps list). For example, when switching away to another VT and saving the virtual machine from this terminal, the followingsequence can be used to make sure the VM is not saved with stuck modifiers: kill -usr1 <pid> VBoxManage cont...

9 Advanced topics This sets up a serial port in the guest with the default settings for COM1 (IRQ 4, I/Oaddress 0x3f8) and the Location setting assumes that this configuration is used on a Windows host, because the Windows named pipe syntax is used. Keep in mind thaton Windows hosts a named pipe mus...

9 Advanced topics arbitrary ways without having to recreate the image file that gives access to the rawdisk. To create an image that represents an entire physical hard disk (which will not contain any actual data, as this will all be stored on the physical disk), on a Linuxhost, use the command VBox...

9 Advanced topics For each of the above variants, you can register the resulting image for immediate use in VirtualBox by adding -register to the respective command line. The image will then immediately appear in the list of registered disk images. An example is VBoxManage internalcommands createraw...

9 Advanced topics This command would reserve the network addresses 192.168.0.0 ... 192.168.254.254 for the first NAT network instance of “My VM”. The guest IP would be assigned to 192.168.0.15 and the default gateway could be found at 192.168.0.2 . 9.13.2 Configuring the boot server (next server) of...

9 Advanced topics VBoxManage setextradata "Linux Guest" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/BindIP" "10.45.0.2" After this, all outgoing traffic will be sent through the interface with the IP address 10.45.0.2. Please make sure that this interface is up and running pri...

9 Advanced topics by dragging the window, switching to fullscreen or seamless mode or sending a videomode hint using VBoxManage. This behavior is what most users will want, but ifyou have different needs, it is possible to change it by issuing one of the followingcommands from the command line: VBox...

9 Advanced topics dmidecode -t0 and the DMI system information can be obtained with dmidecode -t1 9.16 Configuring the guest time stamp counter (TSC) to reflect guest execution By default, VirtualBox keeps all sources of time visible to the guest synchronized to asingle time source, the monotonic ho...

10 VirtualBox programming interfaces VirtualBox comes with comprehensive support for third-party developers. The so-called “Main API” of VirtualBox exposes the entire feature set of the virtualizationengine. It is completely documented and available to anyone who wishes to controlVirtualBox programm...

11 Troubleshooting This chapter provides answers to commonly asked questions. In order to improve youruser experience with VirtualBox, it is recommended to read this section to learn moreabout common pitfalls and get recommendations on how to use the product. 11.1 General 11.1.1 Collecting debugging...

11 Troubleshooting In order to work around this problem (the true fix is to use a faster file system that doesn’t exhibit such unacceptable write performance), it is possible to flush the imagefile after a certain amount of data has been written. This interval is normally infinite,but can be configu...

11 Troubleshooting VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME "VBoxInternal/Devices/ahci/0/LUN#[x]/Config/IgnoreFlush" 0 The value [x] that selects the disk can be a value between 0 and 29.Note that this doesn’t affect the flushes performed according to the configuration described in chapter 11.1.2 , Gu...

11 Troubleshooting These problems are all caused by a bug in the hard disk driver of Windows 2000. After issuing a hard disk request, there is a race condition in the Windows driver codewhich leads to corruption if the operation completes too fast, i.e. the hardware in-terrupt from the IDE controlle...

11 Troubleshooting 11.3 Linux and X11 guests 11.3.1 Linux guests may cause a high CPU load Some Linux guests may cause a high CPU load even if the guest system appears tobe idle. This can be caused by a high timer frequency of the guest kernel. SomeLinux distributions, for example Fedora, ship a Lin...

11 Troubleshooting Certain applications may disable this key against Microsoft’s advice. If it is set to 0,change it to 1 and reboot your system. VirtualBox relies on Windows notifying it ofmedia changes. 11.4.3 Sluggish response when using Microsoft RDP client If connecting to a Virtual Machine via...

11 Troubleshooting 11.5 Linux hosts 11.5.1 Linux kernel module refuses to load If the VirtualBox kernel module ( vboxdrv ) refuses to load, i.e. you get an “Error in- serting vboxdrv: Invalid argument”, check (as root) the output of the dmesg command to find out why the load failed. The most common ...

11 Troubleshooting 11.5.4 Linux host floppy not found The previous instructions (for CD and DVD drives) apply accordingly to floppy disks,except that on older distributions VirtualBox tests for /dev/fd* devices by default, and this can be overridden with the VBOX_FLOPPY environment variable. 11.5.5 ...

11 Troubleshooting domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb -onoexec,nosuid,nodev so that it contains domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb -onoexec,nosuid,nodev,devgid=85,devmode=664 As usual, replace the 85 with the actual group number which should get access to USB devices. Other distributions do simi...

11 Troubleshooting 11.6.2 VM aborts with out of memory errors on Solaris 10 hosts Solaris 10 hosts (bug 1225025) requires swap space equal to, or greater than the host’sphysical memory size. For example, 8 GB physical memory would require at least 8 GBswap. This can be configured during a Solaris 10...

12 Change log • Linux hosts: fixed module dependency for shipped modules (bug #3115) • Linux hosts: moved the udev rules for USB forward so that they don’t overrideexisting system rules (bug #3143) • Linux hosts: fixed the issue with guest not being able to communicate with eachother when attached v...

12 Change log • USB: reduced host CPU utilization if EHCI is active • VRDP: fixed VRDP server black screen after a client reconnect (bug #1989) • VRDP: modified rdesktop client (rdesktop-vrdp) now uses NumLock state syn-chronization (bug #3253) • LsiLogic: make FreeBSD guests work (bug #3174) • ATA:...

13 Known limitations The following section describes some issues that are known not to work in VirtualBox3.1.0_BETA2. Unless marked otherwise these issues are planned to be fixed in laterreleases. • The following Guest SMP (multiprocessor) limitations exist: – Poor performance with 32-bit guests on ...

13 Known limitations – OVF localization (multiple languages in one OVF file) is not yet supported. – Some OVF sections like StartupSection, DeploymentOptionSection and In-stallSection are ignored. – OVF environment documents, including their property sections and appli-ance configuration with ISO im...

14 Third-party licenses VirtualBox incorporates materials from several Open Source software projects. There-fore the use of these materials by VirtualBox is governed by different Open Sourcelicenses. This document reproduces these licenses and provides a list of the materialsused and their respectiv...

15 VirtualBox privacy policy Policy version 1.3, June 29, 2009 This privacy policy sets out how Sun Microsystems, Inc. (“Sun”) treats personal information related to the virtualbox.org website and the VirtualBox registration pro-cess. § 1 virtualbox.org. The “virtualbox.org” website, as any other we...

Glossary A ACPI Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, an industry specification for BIOS and hardware extensions to configure PC hardware and perform power manage-ment. Windows 2000 and higher as well as Linux 2.4 and higher support ACPI.Windows can only enable or disable ACPI support at insta...

Glossary X XML The eXtensible Markup Language, a metastandard for all kinds of textual infor- mation. XML only specifies how data in the document is organized generally anddoes not prescribe how to semantically organize content. XPCOM Mozilla Cross Platform Component Object Model, a programming infr...