10 VirtualBox Tricks and Advanced Features You Must Know About
VirtualBox, also known as Sun VirtualBox and innotek VirtualBox is a virtualization software that helps a user in the virtualization of products that belong to the x86 and AMD64/Intel64-based computers family. Offered for free, the software has several features that you might have never heard of or used, even while working on virtual machines regularly. VMware keeps many of its best features to its paid versions, but this software has kept some of its features that require Guest Additions to be installed in your virtual machine.
The software supports a number of operating systems (OS) ranging from Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows XP, to Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Solaris. Apart from these, the software also supports a few ports such as FreeBSD and Genode. Users using VirtualBox should install the Guest Editions package that will help you speed up your virtual machines and will also let you experience improved overall experience. Owing to its free to operate platform features, users can easily host applications and allow additional guest OSes to be loaded and run within its own virtual environment.
If you’ve never tried this software, just install it and experience some of the advanced amazing virtualization features and tricks mentioned below:
1. Snapshots
One of the most important features of this software is that it can easily create snapshots and save the current state of your virtual machine. It is one of the safest options to revert to the saved state at any point of time, if anything bad happens. Restoring a snapshot will save your device’s present non-working state to the previously working state. This amazing feature is very important to set back your virtual machine in a saved state and the best part is you can have multiple saved states and restore them any time.
To create a snapshot, click on the ‘Machine’ menu and select ‘Take snapshot’ option. You can also use the Snapshots panel to perform the same action. Once the snapshot is successfully saved, you can restore them from this interface later. It is very useful when you are either making changes to your virtual machine or you want to erase some of the tasks that you’ve performed but don’t wish to continue with.
2. 3D Support
This amazing tool has basic support for 3D graphics, but it will not allow you to play the latest 3D games. We completely agree that its doesn’t allow you to enjoy some of the latest 3D games, but it will enable Windows Aero desktop effects to play older 3D games, which aren’t too demanding. Since, the tool doesn’t come with appropriate drivers installed by default, you need to install Guest Editions and manually enable 3D settings from the ‘Settings’ window.
3. Shared Clipboard and Drag and Drop
Copy-pasting and drag-drop features are usually used to save a lot of time and effort required to complete a particular task, but the tool doesn’t support this feature by default. In order to make these features working on your virtual machines, you need to make some changes in the guest and host operating systems (OSes).
The excellent clipboard sharing feature lets you share things between your guest OS and host OS thus, making copy-and-paste work convenient. Additionally, the clipboard will also serve as an active platform for using drag and drop to move files back and forth easily. Both of these features will save your time and efforts, however, you will need to enable them on the guest as well as host operating systems.
4. Port Forwarding
One of the limitations of virtual machines is that these are normally isolated from the network hence, connectivity becomes fragile or unsupported. The advanced features of this tool will let you run server software inside a virtual machine that will help you establish a connection between the machine and the network.
You can set up port forwarding feature to ensure that the server software is reachable from outside of the virtual machine and NAT paired with port forwarding to establish better connectivity. Using NAT paired with port forwarding lets you access the whole network without making many vital changes in your network settings. To enable the feature, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab, under settings window and click on the ‘Port Forwarding’ option in the Network settings pane.
5. Remote Display
Remote display is one of the most important things that each gadget must-offer these days. Connecting to a desktop with a remote display connection lets you access anything on that device with just a few clicks. VirtualBox allows a user to enable remote display for a virtual machine by using it ‘VRDP’ features, which is perfectly compatible with Microsoft’s RDP protocol. Turning this feature on will let you access your VirtualBox, server, location, or network from any PC. Additionally, the tool also assures that you get an optimal control over your virtual machine remotely without the need for any VirtualBox-specific software.
6. Cloning Virtual Machines
Cloning virtual machines isn’t a difficult task for VirtualBox and you can easily create a copy of your virtual device by following a few simple steps. Whenever, a user tries to copy-paste the files manually, he might end up turning with a lot of frustration and annoyances just because both virtual machines are accessed by the same identifier number. Cloning is an ideal solution for such situation as it avoids the pain of copying stuff manually and will ensure the machines don’t conflict with each other.
7. Importing and Exporting VM Appliances
Creating or importing appliances in the virtual machines is quite simple and easy as you can seamlessly add them to the preinstalled operating systems. Users will always have a choice of creating their own appliances or downloading appliances in OVF format and then importing them into VirtualBox. This feature is specially designed for Linux-based virtual machines that can distribute these appliances freely. Additionally, a user can also create an appliance and distribute it amongst your organization.
8. Shared Folders
Sharing things between the host and guest operating systems is has become lot easier with the help of the ‘Shared folders’ option in the VirtualBox. The files and stuff stored in this folder will offer uninterrupted access to both guest as well as host operating system users. To do the same, access virtual machine’s ‘Settings’ window, and configure the folders that can be further accessed or allowed for normal network sharing.
9. Seamless mode
Seamless mode is an excellent feature that lets you break the barrier between running applications on the host as well as guest operating systems. The feature allows you to break the windows out of your guest OS window and place them right away on your host OS’s desktop.
To activate this feature, first install the ‘VirtualBox’s Guest Edition’ package on your virtual machine and then select the ‘View’ menu from the list. Now, click on the ‘Switch to Seamless Mode’ option and save the changes to experience an undisputed connection between the two OSes.
10. USB Devices
Transferring files to a virtual server with the help of the USB device has been made easy with this amazing feature. Now, you can easily connect USB devices to your PC and then connect those to the virtual machine to ensure seamless transfer of files, documents, and other related stuff. Take help of the available USB drives and software for other devices, to plug-in your USB drive into the PC and accessing it from a discrete virtual machine. To do the same, access the virtual machine’s ‘Settings’ window and go to the ‘Devices’ tab. Now, click on the ‘USB Devices’ option and you can choose from the variety of USB devices that you want to connect.
The above mentioned are some of the amazing features that a VirtualBox comes with. Featuring optimal efficiency, all these productivity enhancing features are specially designed and developed for virtual machines. You can use all of these features to turn your virtual devices into amazingly productive yet efficient devices that can also be accessed remotely with the tool’s ‘VRDP’ feature. You can also increase the space of the virtual machine’s disks by using the VBoxManage command however, using it in collaboration with above mentioned features will be an added advantage.
About the Author: Brooke M. Perry is an ardent technician associated with Qresolve online computer support with wide experience of fixing issues with PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphone. With a strong track record of devising effective ways of online tech support and system security, she has so far helped thousands of users across the globe