
1First steps
•Remote machine display. You can run any virtual machine in a special VirtualBox program that acts as a server for the VirtualBox Remote Desktop Pro- tocol (VRDP), a
VirtualBox’s VRDP support does not rely on the RDP server that is built into Microsoft Windows. Instead, a custom VRDP server has been built directly into the virtualization layer. As a result, it works with any operating system (even in text mode) and does not require application support in the virtual machine either.
VRDP support is described in detail in chapter 7.4, Remote virtual machines (VRDP support), page 99.
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
–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 7.4.4, Remote USB, page 103 for details.
1.4 Supported host operating systems
Currently, VirtualBox runs on the following host operating systems:
•Windows hosts:
–Windows XP, all service packs
–Windows Server 2003
–Windows Vista
–Windows Server 2008
–Windows 7
•Mac OS X hosts:2
–10.5 (Leopard, 32-bit)
1Support for
2Preliminary Mac OS X support (beta stage) was added with VirtualBox 1.4, full support with 1.6. Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) support was removed with VirtualBox 3.1.
14