Oracle VM VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, Sun xVM VirtualBox and Innotek VirtualBox) is a type-2 hypervisor for

x86 virtualization x86 virtualization is the use of hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities on an x86/x86-64 CPU. In the late 1990s x86 virtualization was achieved by complex software techniques, necessary to compensate for the processor's lack of hardware-as ...

developed by Oracle Corporation. VirtualBox was originally created by Innotek GmbH, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, which was in turn acquired by Oracle in 2010. VirtualBox may be installed on Microsoft Windows,

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

, Solaris and OpenSolaris. There are also ports to FreeBSD and

Genode Genode is a free and open-source software operating system (OS) framework consisting of a microkernel abstraction layer and a set of user space components. The framework is notable as one of the few open-source operating systems not derived from ...

. It supports the creation and management of guest

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized h ...

s running Windows, Linux,

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 r ...

, Solaris,

Haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or s ...

, and OSx86, as well as limited virtualization of 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 that of graphics, and allows changing the resolution of the guest OS automatically when the window of the virtual machine on the host OS is resized. Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License and, optionally, the

CDDL The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under o ...

for most files of the source distribution, VirtualBox is free and open-source software, though the Extension Pack is

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and i ...

. The License to VirtualBox was relicensed to GPLv3 with linking exceptions to the CDDL and other gpl incompatible licenses.

History

64px, Logo of VirtualBox OSE, 2007–2010 VirtualBox was first offered by ''InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH'' from

Weinstadt Weinstadt (meaning "Wine City") is a town in the Rems-Murr district, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is located in the Rems Valley approximately 15 km east of Stuttgart. Its population in 2012 was 25,998. The town is compose ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

, under a

license, making one version of the product available at no cost for personal or evaluation use, subject to the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). In January 2007, based on counsel by LiSoG, Innotek GmbH released VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) as free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

(GPL), version 2. Innotek GmbH also contributed to the development of

and

support in virtualization and OS/2 ports of products from

Connectix Connectix Corporation was a software and hardware company, noted for having released innovative products that were either made obsolete as Apple Computer incorporated the ideas into system software, or were sold to other companies once they becam ...

which were later acquired by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

. Specifically, Innotek developed the "additions" code in both

Windows Virtual PC Windows Virtual PC (successor to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, and Connectix Virtual PC) is a virtualization program for Microsoft Windows. In July 2006, Microsoft released the Windows version free of charge. In August ...

and

Microsoft Virtual Server Microsoft Virtual Server was a virtualization solution that facilitated the creation of virtual machines on the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. Originally developed by Connectix, it was acquired by Microso ...

, which enables various host–guest OS interactions like shared clipboards or dynamic viewport resizing. Sun Microsystems acquired Innotek in February 2008. Following the

acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed on January 27, 2010. After the acquisition was completed, Oracle, only a software vendor prior to the merger, owned Sun's hardware product lines, such as SPARC Enterprise, as ...

in January 2010, the product was re-branded as "Oracle VM VirtualBox". In December 2019, VirtualBox started supporting only

hardware-assisted virtualization In computing, hardware-assisted virtualization is a platform virtualization approach that enables efficient full virtualization using help from hardware capabilities, primarily from the host processors. A full virtualization is used to emulate a ...

, dropping support for Software-based one.

Release history

; Version 3.2: * Mac OS X Server guest support – experimental *

Memory ballooning In computing, memory ballooning is a technique used to eliminate the need to overprovision host memory used by a virtual machine (VM). To implement it, the virtual machine's kernel implements a "balloon driver" which allocates unused memory within ...

(not available on Solaris hosts) * RAM deduplication (Page Fusion) for Windows guests on 64-bit hosts * CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) * Deleting snapshots while the VM is running * Multi-monitor guest setups in the

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

, for Windows guests * LSI Logic SAS controller emulation * Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) video acceleration via a non-free extension * Run and control guest applications from the host – for automated software deployments ; Version 4.0: * The PUEL/OSE separation was abandoned in favor of an open source base product and a closed source extension pack that can be installed on top of the base product. As part of this change, additional components of VirtualBox were made open source (installers, documentation, device drivers) * Intel HD audio codec emulation * Intel ICH9 chipset emulation * A new VM storage scheme where all VM data is stored in one single folder to improve VM portability * Several UI enhancements including a new look with VM preview and scale mode * On 32-bit hosts, VMs can each use more than 1.5 GB of RAM * In addition to OVF, the single file OVA format is supported * CPU use and I/O bandwidth can be limited per VM * Support for Apple DMG images (DVD) * Multi-monitor guest setups for Linux/Solaris guests (previously Windows only) * Resizing of

disk image A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc, or USB flash drive. A disk image is us ...

formats from Oracle, VDI (VirtualBox disk image), and Microsoft, VHD (Virtual PC hard disk) ; Version 4.1: * Windows Aero support (experimental) * Virtual machine cloning ; Version 4.2: * Virtual machine groups – allows management of a group of virtual machines as a single unit (power them on or off, take snapshots, etc.) * Some VM settings can be altered during VM execution * Support up to 36 NICs in case of the ICH9 chipset * Support for limiting network I/O bandwidth * Can automatically run VMs on host system startup (except on Windows hosts) ; Version 4.3: * VM video-capture support * Host touch device support (GUI passes host touch events to guest)/USB virtualization of such devices ; Version 5.0: *

Paravirtualization In computing, paravirtualization or para-virtualization is a virtualization technique that presents a software interface to the virtual machines which is similar, yet not identical, to the underlying hardware–software interface. The intent o ...

support for Windows and Linux guests to improve time-keeping accuracy and performance * USB3 controller based on Intel's hardware implementation. It is supported by any Windows version starting from

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and later to ...

, any Linux kernel starting from 2.6.31 and Mac OS X starting from version 10.7.4. * Bidirectional

drag and drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to ...

support for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests * VM disk image encryption via a non-free extension * VM output scaling and

HiDPI Pixels per inch (ppi) and pixels per centimetre (ppcm or pixels/cm) are measurements of the pixel density of an electronic image device, such as a computer monitor or television display, or image digitizing device such as a camera or image scanner ...

displays support * Hotplugging of SATA disks using

* USB traffic capturing * VMs can be disconnected from a GUI session and run in background * AVX, AVX-2,

AES-NI An Advanced Encryption Standard instruction set is now integrated into many processors. The purpose of the instruction set is to improve the speed and security of applications performing encryption and decryption using Advanced Encryption Standard ...

, SSE 4.1/4.2 instructions (if supported by the host CPU) ; Version 6.0: * Support for exporting virtual machines to

Oracle Cloud Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers. The company allows ...

* A file manager which allows to control the guest file system and copy files from/to it * VMSVGA GPU driver for Linux hosts * Surround speakers setup support * Support for hardware-assisted

nested virtualization In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, sto ...

on AMD CPUs ; Version 6.1: * Support for importing virtual machines from

* Added

support for Intel CPUs (it was already available for AMD CPUs) starting with Intel Core i5 Broadwell * Experimental support for file transfers via drag-n-drop only for Windows host and guests (disabled by default, must be enabled using VBoxManage) * Support for virtio-scsi for hard disks and optical drives, including boot support * Support for hosts with up to 1024 CPUs *

DXVA DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) is a Microsoft API specification for the Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 platforms that allows video decoding to be hardware-accelerated. The pipeline allows certain CPU-intensive operations such as iDCT, motio ...

(hardware accelerated video decoding) support for Windows guests *

NVRAM Non-volatile random-access memory (NVRAM) is random-access memory that retains data without applied power. This is in contrast to dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and static random-access memory (SRAM), which both maintain data only for as lon ...

support for EFI which improves compatibility with many guest OSes *

Software keyboard A virtual keyboard is a software component that allows the input of characters without the need for physical keys. The interaction with the virtual keyboard happens mostly via a touchscreen interface, but can also take place in a different form ...

(virtual) for entering any keys to a guest * Guest CPU use monitoring * Dropped support for software CPU virtualization: a CPU with hardware virtualization support is now required * Dropped support for PCI passthrough for Linux hosts ; Version 7.0: * Support for Windows 11 guest:

UEFI Secure Boot UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is a set of specifications written by the UEFI Forum. They define the architecture of the platform firmware used for booting and its interface for interaction with the operating system. Examples of ...

and emulation of TPM 1.2 and 2.0 chips * Intel and AMD IOMMU emulation * Full VM encryption (in previous VirtualBox releases only VM disks could be encrypted) available via

CLI CLI may refer to: Computing * Call Level Interface, an SQL database management API * Command-line interface, of a computer program * Command-line interpreter or command language interpreter; see List of command-line interpreters * CLI (x86 instruc ...

* 3D acceleration with

DirectX 11 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

on Windows, and DXVK on other hosts * Dark mode for UI currently implemented only for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

hosts * Experimental support for Apple ARM64 hosts

Licensing

The core package is, since version 4 in December 2010,

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

under

GNU General Public License version 2 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

(GPLv2). The separate "VirtualBox Oracle VM VirtualBox extension pack" providing support for

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

2.0 and 3.0 devices, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), disk encryption,

NVMe NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The ...

and

Preboot Execution Environment In computing, the Preboot eXecution Environment, PXE (most often pronounced as ''pixie'', often called PXE Boot/''pixie boot''.) specification describes a standardized client–server environment that boots a software assembly, retrieved from ...

(PXE) boot is under a

proprietary {{Short pages monitor