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VirtualBox Feed

Oracle VirtualBox resources, news, and support articles.

What's New in Oracle VDI 3.5?

Oracle has just released Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure version 3.5, a major new release which introduces some great new features, but also allows a VDI deployment that can start with a single server, yet scale to the Enterprise. Here's a quick review of some of these features:

Upgrading Linux Guests

Just last week Oracle released Oracle Linux 6.4 and so it was time that Fat Bloke updated his Oracle Linux guests.

So after a simple and quick:

 yum update

I was in a position to reboot into my freshly updated 6.4 vm. But after rebooting I found myself looking at a stuck screen that looked a little like this:

Using VirtualBox Host-only Networking to run servers in your lap

Since the initial blog about VirtualBox and Networking, there have been lots of people asking how to run multiple server vm's on their laptops, allowing the host to also connect to these servers too. As it happens, I recently needed just such a configuration myself so thought I'd share how I did it...

On my Oracle Linux laptop, I wanted to set up a private network within my host on which I would run:

Growing your VirtualBox Virtual Disk

Don't you just hate it when this happens:

Out of disk space

Fortunately, if you're running inside VirtualBox, you can resize your virtual disk and magically make your guest have a bigger disk very easily. There are 2 steps to doing this...

Creating and using VM Groups in VirtualBox

VirtualBox.pngWith VirtualBox 4.2 we introduced the Groups feature which allows you to organize and manage your guest virtual machines collectively, rather than individually.

What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2?

VirtualBox.pngA year is a long time in the IT industry. Since the last VirtualBox feature release, which was a little over a year ago, we've seen:

VirtualBox and Mountain Lion (Mac OS X 10.8)

VirtualBox.png[Update:

VirtualBox 4.1.20 and later are now completely compatible with Mountain Lion and this jiggery-pokery is no longer needed

- FB]

Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

A lot of the recent blog entries here have been about Oracle VM VirtualBox, possibly the coolest personal desktop virtualization product known to man. Deploying VirtualBox on your PC or Mac lets you run many virtual desktops at the same time to one user, you.

But did you know that VirtualBox can also power an Enterprise-scale virtual desktop deployment too, delivering many desktops to many users? 

Networking in VirtualBox

VirtualBox.pngNetworking in VirtualBox is extremely powerful, but can also be a bit daunting, so here's a quick overview of the different ways you can setup networking in VirtualBox, with a few pointers as to which configurations should be used and when.

Passing data between the VirtualBox Host and the Guest

Here's a good question: "How can you figure out the VM name from within the VM itself?"

While this data is not automatically available, the general purpose, and very powerful VirtualBox "GuestProperty" APIs can be used from the host and guest to pass arbitrary data, in key/value pairs format, in and out of the guest. Note that this does require that the VirtualBox Guest Additions have been installed in the guest.

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