Virtual Box

Oracle VirtualBox

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Configuration and Settings

Beside the settings accessible through the GUI, further settings can be edited with vboxmanage and are stored in the .vbox XML file for that VM.
Example changing the chassis asset tag:
vboxmanage setextradata "vm name" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiChassisAssetTag" "WKS000100"
Setting an empty value will remove the entry from the settings.

Networking

• paravirtualized network adapter required for some setups (EFI iPXE?) has problems with “warm” reboot (i.e. “reset” function in VB), so “cold” reboot should be used.
• UWP install from PXE requires Intel network adapter and doesn’t work with Remco’s DHCP proxy

Capture network traffic to pcap file, enable network tracing¹

# VBoxManage modifyvm [your-vm] --nictrace[adapter-number] on --nictracefile[adapter-number] file.pcap
# VirtualBox -startvm [your-vm]

Guest Additions

Provide improved performance and behaviour of guest machine. Require kernel development packages to be installed in guest system, e.g.

sudo yum install -y kernel-devel

Should be accessible via Devices > Insert Guest Additions CD Image. If this fails with a error about certificates, download the GuestAddtions manually from https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/$VBOX_VERSION/VBoxGuestAdditions_$VBOX_VERSION.iso. Then add a optical drive in Settings > Storage and chose the downloaded ISO. Boot the guest machine and the ISO should be mounted automatically. Start the installation script, see Manual: Chapter 4. Guest Additions

$ sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
To build modules for other installed kernels, run
VirtualBox Guest Additions: &emsp;&emsp;/sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup <version>
VirtualBox Guest Additions: or
VirtualBox Guest Additions: &emsp;&emsp;/sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup all

Update: Devices > Upgrade Guest Additions

Integration

VirtualBox in Docker

To expose the hosts VirtualBox to a container, create a mapping for the device /dev/vboxdrv with

docker run -it --dev "/dev/vboxdrv:/dev/vboxdrv"

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1. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Network_tips ↩