Virtual Box

Oracle VM VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, Sun xVM VirtualBox and innotek VirtualBox) is an x86 virtualization software package, created by software company Innotek GmbH, purchased in 2008 by Sun Microsystems, and now developed by Oracle Corporation as part of its family of virtualization products. Oracle VM VirtualBox is installed on an existing host operating system as an application; this host application allows additional guest operating systems, each known as a Guest OS, to be loaded and run, each with its own virtual environment.

Supported host operating systems include Linux, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Solaris, and OpenSolaris; there is also a port to FreeBSD. Supported guest operating systems include versions and derivations of Windows, Linux, BSD, OS/2, Solaris and others. Since release 3.2.0, VirtualBox also allows limited virtualization of Mac OS X guests on Apple hardware, though OSX86 can also be installed using VirtualBox.

Since version 4.1, Windows guests on supported hardware can take advantage of the recently implemented WDDM driver included in the guest additions; this allows Windows Aero to be enabled along with Direct3D support.