3 Configuring virtual machines
To remove a virtual disk or drive, select it and click on the “remove” icon at the bottom (or
Removable media (CD/DVDs and floppies) can be changed while the guest is run- ning. Since the “Settings” dialog is not available at that time, you can also access these settings from the “Devices” menu of your virtual machine window.
We have dedicated an entire chapter of this User Manual to virtual storage: please see chapter 5, Virtual storage, page 76 for every single detail about storage configura- tion.
3.7 Audio settings
The “Audio” section in a virtual machine’s Settings window determines whether the VM will see a sound card connected, and whether the audio output should be heard on the host system.
If audio is enabled for a guest, you can choose between the emulation of an Intel AC’97 controller or a SoundBlaster 16 card. In any case, you can select what audio driver VirtualBox will use on the host.
On a Linux host, depending on your host configuration, you can also select between the OSS, ALSA or the PulseAudio subsystem. On newer Linux distributions (Fedora 8 and above, Ubuntu 8.04 and above) the PulseAudio subsystem should be preferred.
3.8 Network settings
The “Network” section in a virtual machine’s Settings window allows you to configure how VirtualBox presents virtual network cards to your VM, and how they operate.
When you first create a virtual machine, VirtualBox by default enables one virtual network card and selects the “Network Address Translation” (NAT) mode for it. This way the guest can connect to the outside world using the host’s networking and the outside world can connect to services on the guest which you choose to make visible outside of the virtual machine.
Note: If you are installing Windows Vista in a virtual machine, you will proba- bly have no networking initially. See chapter 4.3.5, Windows Vista networking, page 64 for instructions how to solve this problem.
In most cases, this default setup will work fine for you.
However, VirtualBox is extremely flexible in how it can virtualize networking. It supports up to eight virtual network cards per virtual machine, the first four of which can be configured in detail in the graphical user interface. All eight network cards can be configured on the command line with VBoxManage. Because of this, we have dedicated an entire chapter of this manual to discussing networking configuration; please see chapter 6, Virtual networking, page 88.
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