virtual

VirtualBox by Sun

One of my favorite free apps is by far, Virtual Box by Sun MIcrosystems. While it may not work for every OS on the planet. It’s sufficient for 99% of users. If you’re curious about using linux, or need a development environment without the expense and footprint of another computer in the house, VirtualBox is for you. Many of my friends in the malware prevention universe use some sort of VM. Unless they get VMWare for free, their choice is VirtualBox.

A list of compatible OS’s is found here.

What you will need to run this is atleast 2 gigs of RAM and a lot of hard drive space. As each virtual machine needs it’s own virtual partition. With RAM and hard drive prices low, this should not hinder anyone from using VirtualBox.

The control panel is intuitive, and VirtualBox can install the OS from a disk or the .iso on the hard drive. This feature is one of my favorites. You can setup the virtual machine with many permissions to use your computers hardware or not. The most trouble I’ve had is with the virtual network adapters. Windows server in particular needed some experimentation to find the right driver.

All in all, free is good and VirtualBox allows so much to be done, I’m surprised it’s still free.