VirtualBox puts more of the information right out there for the user to see than Virtual PC did. A thumbnail preview shows a running machine’s current display. Selecting a virtual machine displays many of its settings in the main window. The main screen for Oracle VM VirtualBox. Since I needed machines I could run on both my Windows 7 and 8 computers, I decided to create them in VirtualBox. I played around with it briefly last year, creating a few virtual machines, and then went on to other things but came back to it this past week when I started preparing for one of my latest projects and needed to setup some specialized machines. Oracle VM VirtualBoxĪ couple years ago, I decided to start exploring some of the other options for virtualization and stumbled across Oracle VM VirtualBox, Oracle’s free virtualization software which supports many operating systems including Windows, various flavors of Linux, Solaris and OS/2. With the release of Windows 8, it was succeeded by Hyper-V on machines with the necessary hardware requirements and Windows 8 editions. Virtual PC was a somewhat simplified virtualization software which officially supported various versions of DOS and Windows and made the virtualization concept a little more accessible to the average user. Virtualization software enables a computer to act as a host, running multiple computer sessions with different operating systems for the purpose of testing software, isolating specific programs from the rest of the software on the host machine or maintaining older operating systems as needed after an upgrade. Several years ago, I wrote an article for this site about Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft’s implementation of virtualization technology for the Windows desktop. This image shows a virtual machine with Windows XP installed,, referred to as the guest system, running on a Windows 7 host machine. Virtual machines enable the user to run multiple guest systems on the same computer.

Oracle virtualization