Oracle VM VirtualBox is an industrial-strength open source virtualisation tool that makes it easy to create virtual machines (VMs), simulated computers that run on your PC but act as though they were separate systems. It's a powerful capability that has many different applications.
If you'd like a closer look at Windows 10 before you upgrade, for instance, then you could install Microsoft's latest in a VM, then access it in a window on your XP or Vista desktop.
VirtualBox is an easy and elegant solution for those who want to control a computer from another computer. VirtualBox offers virtualize your operating system (OS) guests on a host machine. Called hypervisor, the application supports Windows OS X, Linux, Mac, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc. As host, Mac OS X missing the call as a guest. I'm trying to use virtualbox on my mac to host multiple vms. Modern macos version sierra (10.12), tested with virtualbox 5.1.6 r110634. To build a vm running macos, follow the directions below download the installer from.
Or maybe you've upgraded to Windows 10 and find a favourite old app doesn't work any more? Create a Windows XP VM and you might be able to run it again.
VirtualBox can also be a useful security tool: if you download and test apps in a VM, then any malware you might encounter will be isolated from your main system.
And it's the perfect choice if you want to try out another operating system with the minimum of hassle. Right now you can install Google Chrome OS, all the mainstream Linux variants (2.4 and 2.6), OpenBSD, OS/2, ReactOS, SkyOS, DOS, and just about every version of Windows there's ever been. (Of course you'll need to have the system discs to hand.)
VirtualBox 6 included an interface redesign, making it easier to view and manage your virtual machines. VM displays can now be scaled, so you can reduce a window size by half (for instance) and still see everything that's going on. The ability to limit a VM's CPU and IO time means the program will be less of a drain on your system's resources, and there are a host of other performance optimisations and bug fixes available.
What's new in VirtualBox 6.1.2 (see changelog for more)?
- Virtualization core: fixed performance issue observed with Windows XP guests on AMD hosts (6.0.0 regression; bug #19152)
- Virtualization core: consistent IBRS/IBPB CPUID feature reporting, avoids crash of NetBSD 9.0 RC1 installer (bug #19146)
- GUI: fixed updating of runtime info
- GUI: in Display settings, do not show '2D video acceleration' checkbox if it is meaningless for the selected graphics adapter
- Audio: fixed audio input handling when VRDE is enabled
- Audio: fixed crash in the HDA emulation when using multi-speaker configurations
- Storage: fixed use of encrypted disks with snapshots involved (6.1.0 regression; bug #19160)
- Storage: improve performance of virtio-scsi
- Storage: read-only support for compressed clusters in QCOW2 images
- Windows installer: include unintentionally dropped vbox-img.exe utility again
- Windows host: when installing or removing an extension pack, retry the sometimes failing directory renaming (usually caused by anti-virus software accessing the directory)
- Linux host: Support Linux 5.5 (guest additions not yet)
- Windows guest: accelerate 2D video decoding (scaling and color space conversion) if the VM is configured to use VBoxSVGA with 3D enabled
- Windows guest: fix guest additions installer to upgrade the mouse filter driver reliably
- Windows guest: when uninstalling older Guest Additions with old 3D support enabled try restoring original Direct3D files
- Linux guest: improve resize and multi-monitor handling for VMs using VMSVGA (known remaining issue: do not disable a monitor 'in the middle', causes confusion)
- Virtualization core: consistent IBRS/IBPB CPUID feature reporting, avoids crash of NetBSD 9.0 RC1 installer (bug #19146)
- GUI: fixed updating of runtime info
- GUI: in Display settings, do not show '2D video acceleration' checkbox if it is meaningless for the selected graphics adapter
- Audio: fixed audio input handling when VRDE is enabled
- Audio: fixed crash in the HDA emulation when using multi-speaker configurations
- Storage: fixed use of encrypted disks with snapshots involved (6.1.0 regression; bug #19160)
- Storage: improve performance of virtio-scsi
- Storage: read-only support for compressed clusters in QCOW2 images
- Windows installer: include unintentionally dropped vbox-img.exe utility again
- Windows host: when installing or removing an extension pack, retry the sometimes failing directory renaming (usually caused by anti-virus software accessing the directory)
- Linux host: Support Linux 5.5 (guest additions not yet)
- Windows guest: accelerate 2D video decoding (scaling and color space conversion) if the VM is configured to use VBoxSVGA with 3D enabled
- Windows guest: fix guest additions installer to upgrade the mouse filter driver reliably
- Windows guest: when uninstalling older Guest Additions with old 3D support enabled try restoring original Direct3D files
- Linux guest: improve resize and multi-monitor handling for VMs using VMSVGA (known remaining issue: do not disable a monitor 'in the middle', causes confusion)
This professional quality virtualization package must be one of the most powerful open source tools around
VMware Fusion 11.0.2
Trial Software
Run a virtual operating system on your Mac
VMware Workstation 15.5.1
Trial Software
Host and run a virtual operating system on your computer
VMware Workstation Player 15.5.1
Freeware
Test virtual operating systems
Parallels Desktop for Mac 15.1.2
Trial Software
Run another operating system, seamlessly, on your Mac
Portable-VirtualBox Creator 6.4.10
Freeware
Turn VirtualBox in to a standalone portable application
GPU Shark 0.16.0.0
Freeware
Easily monitor exactly what's happening with your GeForce or Radeon-based graphics card
SepPDF 3.27
Freeware
Extract pages from PDFs
stretchly 0.21.1
Freeware
Get regular 'take a break' reminders
VirtualBox Extension Pack 6.1.2
Free, for personal-use only
Add new capabilities to VirtualBox with this extension pack
Wise Duplicate Finder 1.3.5.43
Freeware
Quickly find unnecessary duplicated files across your system
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.
Some of the features of VirtualBox are:
- Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. 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. 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 VirtualBox.
- Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.
Version 5.1.6 is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
- GUI: fixed issue with opening '.vbox' files and it's aliases
- GUI: keyboard grabbing fixes (bugs #15771 and #15745)
- GUI: fix for passing through Ctrl + mouse-click (Mac OS X hosts only; bug #15714)
- GUI: fixed automatic deletion of extension pack files (bugs #11352 and #14742)
- USB: fixed showing unknown device instead of the manufacturer or product description under certain circumstances (5.1.0 regression; bug #15764)
- XHCI: another fix for a hanging guest under certain conditions as result of the fix for bug #15747, this time for Windows 7 guests
- Serial: fixed high CPU usage with certain USB to serial converters on Linux hosts (bug #7796)
- Storage: fixed attaching stream optimized VMDK images (bug #14764)
- Storage: reject image variants which are unsupported by the backend (bug #7227)
- Storage: fixed loading saved states created with VirtualBox 5.0.10 and older when using a SCSI controller (bug #15865)
- Storage: fixed broken NVMe emulation if the host I/O cache setting is enabled
- Storage: fixed using multiple NVMe controllers if ICH9 is used
- NVMe: fixed a crash during reset which could happen under certain circumstances
- Audio: fixed microphone input (5.1.2 regression; bugs #14386 and #15802)
- Audio: fixed crashes under certain conditions (5.1.0 regression; bug #15887 and others)
- Audio: fixed recording with the ALSA backend (5.1 regression)
- Audio: fixed stream access mode with OSS backend (5.1 regression, thanks to Jung-uk Kim)
- E1000: do also return masked bits when reading the ICR register, this fixes booting from iPXE (5.1.2 regression; bug #15846)
- BIOS: fixed 4bpp scanline calculation (bug #15787)
- API: relax the check for the version attribute in OVF/OVA appliances (bug #15856)
- Windows hosts: fixed crashes when terminating the VM selector or other VBox COM clients (bug #15726 and others)
- Linux Installer: fixed path to the documentation in .rpm packages (5.1.0 regression)
- Linux Installer: fixed the vboxdrv.sh script to prevent an SELinux complaint (bug #15816)
- Linux hosts: don't use 32-bit legacy capabilities
- Linux Additions: Linux 4.8 fix for the kernel display driver (bugs #15890 and #15896)
- Linux Additions: don't load the kernel modules provided by the Linux distribution but load the kernel modules from the official Guest Additions package instead (bug #15324)
- Linux Additions: fix dynamic resizing problems in recent Linux guests (bug #15875)
- User Manual: fixed error in the VBoxManage chapter for the getextradata enumerate example (bug #15862)
Download: VirtualBox 5.1.6 | 117.0 MB (Open Source)
View: VirtualBox Home Page
View: VirtualBox Home Page