Sun Microsystems VERSION 3.1.0_BETA2 user manual Display settings, Storage settings

3 Configuring virtual machines

On AMD processors, nested paging has been available starting with the Barcelona (K10) architecture; Intel added support for nested paging, which they call “extended page tables” (EPT), with their Core i7 (Nehalem) processors.

Nested paging is still disabled by default even for new machines, but it can be enabled for each virtual machine individually in the machine settings.

If your system supports nested paging (AMD-V) or EPT (VT-x), then you can expect a significant performance increase by enabling hardware virtualization and the nested paging feature

•On Intel CPUs, another hardware feature called “Virtual Processor Identifiers” (VPIDs) can greatly accelerate context switching by reducing the need for expen- sive flushing of the processor’s Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs). To enable this feature for a VM, you need to use the command line; see chapter 8.5, VBox- Manage modifyvm, page 114.

3.5 Display settings

Video memory size This sets the size of the memory provided by the virtual graph- ics card available to the guest, in MB. As with the main memory, the specified amount will be allocated from the host’s resident memory. Based on the amount of video memory, higher resolutions and color depths may be available.

Enable 3D acceleration If a virtual machine has Guest Additions installed, you can select here whether the guest should support accelerated 3D graphics. Please refer to chapter 4.9, Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL and Direct3D 8/9), page 72 for details.

Enable 2D video acceleration If a virtual machine with Microsoft Windows has Guest Additions installed, you can select here whether the guest should sup- port accelerated 2D video graphics. Please refer to chapter 4.10, Hardware 2D video acceleration for Windows guests, page 73 for details.

Remote display Under the “Remote display” tab, you can enable the VRDP server that is built into VirtualBox to allow you to connect to the virtual machine re- motely. For this, you can use any standard RDP viewer, such as mstsc.exe that comes with Microsoft Windows or, on Linux systems, the standard open-source rdesktop program. These features are described in detail in chapter 7.4, Re- mote virtual machines (VRDP support), page 99.

3.6 Storage settings

In the VM Settings window, the “Storage” section allows you to connect virtual hard disk, CD-ROM/DVD and floppy images and drives to your virtual machine:

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