Sun Microsystems 3.0.0 user manual

1Introduction

–Full ACPI support. The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is fully supported by VirtualBox. This eases cloning of PC images from real machines or third-party virtual machines into VirtualBox. With its unique ACPI power status support, VirtualBox can even report to ACPI- aware guest operating systems the power status of the host. For mobile systems running on battery, the guest can thus enable energy saving and notify the user of the remaining power (e.g. in fullscreen modes).

–Multiscreen resolutions. VirtualBox virtual machines support screen res- olutions many times that of a physical screen, allowing them to be spread over a large number of screens attached to the host system.

–Built-in iSCSI support. This unique feature allows you to connect a vir- tual machine directly to an iSCSI storage server without going through the host system. The VM accesses the iSCSI target directly without the extra overhead that is required for virtualizing hard disks in container files. For details, see chapter 5.5, iSCSI servers, page 80.

–PXE Network boot. The integrated virtual network cards of VirtualBox fully support remote booting via the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE).

•Multigeneration snapshots. VirtualBox can save successive snapshots of the state of the virtual machine. You can revert the virtual machine to the state of any of the snapshots. For details, see chapter 3.4.4, Snapshots, page 42.

•VRDP remote access. You can run any virtual machine in a special VirtualBox program that acts as a server for the VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP). With this unique feature, VirtualBox provides high-performance remote access to any virtual machine. A custom RDP server has been built directly into the virtualization layer and offers unprecedented performance and feature rich- ness.

VRDP support is described in detail in chapter 7.4, Remote virtual machines (VRDP support), page 93.

On top of this special capacity, VirtualBox offers you more unique features:

–Extensible RDP authentication. VirtualBox already supports Winlogon on Windows and PAM on Linux for RDP authentication. In addition, it includes an easy-to-use SDK which allows you to create arbitrary interfaces for other methods of authentication; see chapter 9.3, Custom external VRDP authentication, page 129 for details.

–USB over RDP. Via RDP virtual channel support, VirtualBox also allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices locally to a virtual machine which is running remotely on a VirtualBox RDP server; see chapter 7.4.3, Remote USB, page 97 for details.

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