Oracle VM VirtualBox

Oracle VM VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, Sun xVM VirtualBox and Innotek VirtualBox) is a hypervisor for x86 computers from Oracle Corporation. Innotek GmbH first developed the product before a Sun Microsystems acquisition in 2008. Oracle has continued development since 2010. VirtualBox may be installed on an existing host operating system; it can create and manage guest virtual machines, each with a guest operating system and its own virtual environment. Supported host operating systems include Linux, OS X, Windows XP and later, Solaris, and OpenSolaris; there are also ports to FreeBSDand Genode.Supported guest operating systems include versions and derivations of Windows, Linux, BSD, OS/2, Solaris, Haiku and others. Since release 3.2.0, VirtualBox also allows limited virtualization of OS X guests on Apple hardware, though OSx86 can also be installed using VirtualBox. Guest Additions should be installed on the guest operating system in order to achieve the best possible experience. It consist of device drivers and system applications that optimize the guest operating system for better performance and usability. Since version 4.3 (released in October 2013), Windows guests on supported hardware can take advantage of the WDDM driver included in the Guest Additions package; this allows Windows Aero to be enabled along with Direct3D support. VirtualBox was initially offered by Innotek GmbH from Weinstadt, Germany under a proprietary software license, making one version of the product available at no cost for personal or evaluation use, subject to the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). In January 2007, based on counsel by LiSoG, Innotek GmbH released VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) as free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2. Innotek GmbH also contributed to the development of OS/2 and Linux support in virtualization and OS/2 ports[15] of products from Connectix which were later acquired by Microsoft. Specifically, Innotek developed the “additions” code in both Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server, which enables various host-guest OS interactions like shared clipboards or dynamic viewport resizing. Sun Microsystems acquired Innotek in February 2008. Oracle Corporation acquired Sun in January 2010 and re-branded the product as "Oracle VM VirtualBox" With version 4 of VirtualBox, released in December 2010, the core package is free software released under GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). This is the fully featured package, excluding some proprietary components not available under GPLv2. These components provide support for USB 2.0 devices, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) for Intel cards and are released as a separate "VirtualBox Oracle VM VirtualBox extension pack" under a proprietary Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL), which permits use of the software for personal use, educational use, or evaluation, free of charge. Oracle defines personal use as any situation in which one person installs the software, and only that individual, and their friends and family, use the software. Oracle does not care if that use is for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Oracle would consider it non-personal use, for example, if a network administrator installed many copies of the software on many different machines, on behalf of many different end-users. That type of situation would require purchasing a special volume license. Prior to version 4, there were two different packages of the VirtualBox software. The full package was offered free under the PUEL, with licenses for other commercial deployment purchasable from Oracle. A second package called the VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) was released under GPLv2. This removed the same proprietary components not available under GPLv2. Virtualbox requires the use of the Open Watcom compiler to build the BIOS since version 4.2. Although VirtualBox has experimental support for Mac OS X guests, the end user license agreement of Mac OS X does not permit the operating system to run on non-Apple hardware, enforced within the operating system by calls to the Apple System Management Controller (SMC) in all Apple machines, which verifies the authenticity of the hardware