Sharing the clipboard between the host and guest operating systems for the purposes of copying and pasting is also possible if it's enabled, though it's disabled by default. VirtualBox includes a few basic features to enable communication with the host OS: the host's filesystem can be made available to the VM using VirtualBox's "shared folders" feature-add a folder from the host operating system here, and it will appear to the guest system as a networked drive.
The VirtualBox Guest Additions add mouse pointer integration, rudimentary 3D support, and other features to your guest operating system.
I used a 2011 iMac with OS X 10.8.2 installed, and tested 64-bit versions of both Windows 7 and Windows 8 running in VirtualBox 4.2.1. One of the only differences is that OS X virtual machines, which are still labeled as an experimental feature in the current version of the software, are officially supported only within OS X hosts, both because of Apple's licensing stipulations and because OS X won't run on all of the CPUs that Windows and Linux can use.įor this article, I have attempted to evaluate VirtualBox both on its own merits and based on the criteria we laid out in our Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion shootout. The focus of this article, as it was in our VMware and Parallels comparison, will be on running Windows 7 and Windows 8 guests on an OS X host, but VirtualBox's cross-platform nature means that many of the observations made in this article will also apply to VirtualBox running on Windows and Linux hosts. Both Parallels and VMware offer plenty of features for home and business users, but is VirtualBox an acceptable alternative for the cash-strapped?
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