Sun Microsystems 3.0.0 user manual Introduction, Virtualization basics

1 Introduction

Sun VirtualBox is a collection of powerful virtual machine tools, targeting desktop computers, enterprise servers and embedded systems. With VirtualBox, you can virtu- alize 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems on machines with Intel and AMD processors, either by using hardware virtualization features provided by these processors or even entirely in software, at your option.

You can find a brief feature overview in chapter 1.3, Features overview, page 13; see chapter 12, Change log, page 155 for a detailed list of version changes.

1.1 Virtualization basics

With VirtualBox, you can run unmodified operating systems – including all of the software that is installed on them – directly on top of your existing operating system, in a special environment called a “virtual machine”. Your physical computer is then usually called the “host”, while the virtual machine is often called a “guest”.

The following image shows you how VirtualBox, on a Linux host, is running Win- dows Vista as guest operating system in a virtual machine window:

VirtualBox allows the guest code to run unmodified, directly on the host computer, and the guest operating system “thinks” it’s running on a real machine. In the back-

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