Cloud Parts

Oracle VirtualBox

Oracle’s free, open-source desktop hypervisor: a type-2 hypervisor that runs VMs as an application on Windows, macOS, Linux and Solaris, scriptable with VBoxManage and the default provider for Vagrant.

What it is
Hypervisors
Used for
Virtual machines
Type
Open source
Made by
Oracle
License
GPLv3 for the base package and Guest Additions (GPLv2 before 7.0); the optional Extension Pack is proprietary: free under the PUEL for personal and educational use, a paid Enterprise license otherwise
Facts checked
11 October 2026
Website Source code

What it is

VirtualBox is a hosted (type 2) hypervisor: it installs like any other application on an existing operating system and runs virtual machines beside your normal programs, unlike a bare-metal hypervisor that owns the hardware. On x86_64 it runs on Windows, Linux, Intel Macs and Oracle Solaris and hosts x86 and x86_64 guests such as Windows, Linux and Solaris. Version 7.1 (September 2024) added Apple silicon Macs and 7.2 (August 2025) Windows on Arm, but an Arm host runs only Arm guests: 64-bit Arm Linux and Windows 11 for Arm, not x86 systems. Each VM is an XML settings file plus disk images (VDI, VMDK or VHD), the same on every host, so a VM made on Windows runs on Linux, and VMs move between products as OVF appliances. On a Windows host where Hyper-V is on, VirtualBox uses Hyper-V as its virtualization engine, which the manual warns can slow VMs down significantly.

You drive it from the VirtualBox Manager GUI or from VBoxManage, which can do everything the GUI does: create and modify VMs, attach disks, run an unattended OS install, take and restore snapshots, and start VMs headless with no window. Installing the Guest Additions inside a guest adds drivers for mouse integration, automatic resizing and better video, shared folders, a shared clipboard, drag and drop, seamless windows and time sync. Each VM gets up to eight virtual network cards (four in the GUI), each in its own mode: NAT, the default, where the guest reaches out but nothing reaches in without port forwarding; NAT Network; bridged onto the physical LAN; host-only; internal (VMs only); and a few rarer modes. Vagrant uses VirtualBox as its default provider.

The base package, including the Guest Additions, has been GPLv3 since 7.0 (October 2022), a switch Oracle made for compatibility with the license of Qt 5.7 and later. The optional Extension Pack adds the VRDP remote display server, host webcam passthrough, an Intel PXE boot ROM, AES disk image encryption and Oracle Cloud integration, and is not open source. Its PUEL license covers personal and educational use only and excludes any use to run a business, organization, government body or school; that needs an Enterprise license, which Oracle sells for named workstation users in a minimum quantity of 100. The current release is 7.2.20 (September 22, 2026); the 7.2 branch has had eight maintenance releases so far in 2026, and the older 7.1 branch still got 7.1.18 in April 2026.

Why teams pick it

  • Free and open source (GPLv3), on all major desktop operating systems, with VM files that move between hosts unchanged
  • Good desktop integration through the Guest Additions: shared folders, clipboard, drag and drop, automatic resizing, seamless windows
  • Fully scriptable: VBoxManage covers every GUI action, including unattended installs, headless start and snapshots, and it is the interface Vagrant drives
  • Branched snapshot trees: save a VM’s state, go back to any snapshot and start an alternative configuration from there
  • Per-NIC networking modes, from simple NAT to bridged, host-only and internal networks, cover most local lab topologies

Watch out for

  • A desktop tool, not a server platform: VMs run on top of a general-purpose host OS, and the manual warns not to run another hypervisor’s VMs at the same time because it can crash the host; with Hyper-V on, VirtualBox runs on top of it and can be much slower
  • On Apple silicon and Windows on Arm it runs only Arm guests (Linux and Windows 11), no x86 systems; 3D acceleration on Arm Macs is experimental, and Arm VMs saved in 7.1 can’t be resumed in 7.2
  • The Extension Pack is proprietary: the PUEL forbids business, government and school use, the Enterprise license comes in a minimum of 100 named users, 7.1 removed the PUEL’s evaluation clause, and the binaries may not be redistributed
  • Oracle gives Premier support only for selected guests (recent Windows, Oracle Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Solaris); Ubuntu, SUSE, older Windows and others get limited support only

Alternatives

What all hypervisors have in common →
Cloud HypervisorOpen sourceA Rust virtual machine monitor for modern cloud VMs on KVM or Microsoft’s hypervisor: virtio devices only, plus hotplug, VFIO passthrough, live migration, snapshots and Windows guests.KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)Open sourceThe hypervisor built into the Linux kernel: it runs guest code directly on the CPU through `/dev/kvm`, and leaves device emulation to a user-space program such as QEMU or Firecracker.libvirtOpen sourceA stable API, daemon and `virsh` command line for managing virtual machines, storage and networks, with drivers for QEMU/KVM, Xen, LXC, Cloud Hypervisor, VMware ESX, Hyper-V and more.Microsoft Hyper-VCommercialMicrosoft’s type-1 hypervisor, built into Windows Server and Windows 10 and 11 Pro and Enterprise: a thin hypervisor under a Windows root partition, which also underpins Azure’s hypervisor and Windows features like VBS, WSL 2 and Windows Sandbox.Proxmox Virtual EnvironmentOpen sourceA Debian-based server platform from Vienna that runs KVM virtual machines and LXC containers, with clustering, high availability, Ceph and ZFS storage, backups and a web interface in one free ISO.QEMUOpen sourceThe open-source machine emulator and virtualizer: it emulates whole computers in software, or runs them at native speed on a hypervisor such as KVM, and supplies the virtual devices either way.VMware ESXiCommercialVMware’s bare-metal hypervisor (called ESX again since VCF 9), whose own kernel runs VMs directly on servers while vCenter adds vMotion, HA, DRS and vSAN; since Broadcom bought VMware in 2023 it is sold only as per-core subscriptions.Xen Project hypervisorOpen sourceThe open-source type-1 hypervisor from Cambridge that ran the first Amazon EC2 instances: a small microkernel-style core that boots first, with drivers and management in a privileged VM called dom0.

How it fits with other technologies

Create a VM, give it a disk and NAT port forwarding, install Oracle Linux unattended and boot it headless (adapted from the VirtualBox user manual) · bash

VM="ol7-autoinstall"
ISO="/u01/Software/OL/OracleLinux-R7-U6-Server-x86_64-dvd.iso"
VBoxManage list ostypes                 # find the exact --ostype name
VBoxManage createvm --name "$VM" --ostype "Oracle_64" --register

# A 32768 MB disk on a SATA controller, and the install ISO in an IDE DVD drive
VBoxManage createmedium disk --filename "/VirtualBox/$VM/$VM.vdi" --size 32768
VBoxManage storagectl "$VM" --name "SATA Controller" --add sata --controller IntelAHCI
VBoxManage storageattach "$VM" --storagectl "SATA Controller" --port 0 --device 0 \
  --type hdd --medium "/VirtualBox/$VM/$VM.vdi"
VBoxManage storagectl "$VM" --name "IDE Controller" --add ide
VBoxManage storageattach "$VM" --storagectl "IDE Controller" --port 0 --device 0 \
  --type dvddrive --medium "$ISO"

# 8 GB of RAM; NIC 1 in NAT mode, with host port 2222 forwarded to the guest’s SSH port
VBoxManage modifyvm "$VM" --ioapic on --memory 8192 --vram 128
VBoxManage modifyvm "$VM" --nic1 nat --nat-pf1 "guestssh,tcp,,2222,,22"

# Unattended install from the ISO, with the Guest Additions
VBoxManage unattended install "$VM" --iso="$ISO" \
  --user=login --full-user-name=name --user-password=password \
  --install-additions --time-zone=CET
VBoxManage startvm "$VM" --type headless

# Later: save the state as a snapshot you can return to
VBoxManage snapshot "$VM" take "fresh-install"

Networking modes#

Who can reach whom in each mode of a virtual network card, from the overview table in the VirtualBox user manual.

ModeVM to hostHost to VMVM to VMVM to LANLAN to VM
NAT (default)yesport forwardingnoyesport forwarding
NAT Networkyesport forwardingyesyesport forwarding
Bridgedyesyesyesyesyes
Host-onlyyesyesyesnono
Internalnonoyesnono
  • Bridged mode puts the VM on the physical network like another machine; NAT hides it behind the host, so a server in the guest needs a port-forwarding rule such as --nat-pf1.

What runs where#

Host and guest combinations in VirtualBox 7.2, from the user manual.

HostHost operating systemsGuests
x86_64 (Intel or AMD)Windows, Windows Server, Linux, macOS on Intel Macs, Oracle Solarisx86 and x86_64: Windows, Windows Server, Linux, Oracle Solaris and other x86 systems
Arm64macOS on Apple silicon (since 7.1); Windows 11 on Arm (since 7.2, experimental in the manual)64-bit Arm only: Linux distributions and Windows 11 for Arm

See it in a real stack

No architecture uses Oracle VirtualBox yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →
Where it came from2007–2025

VirtualBox began at innotek, a privately funded company in Stuttgart, Germany, with offices in Dresden and Berlin, that had worked on PC virtualization since 2001. It first sold VirtualBox under a proprietary license. On January 15, 2007 innotek made version 1.3.2 free software under the GPL, while still selling an enterprise variant with extra features and support under a proprietary license.

Sun Microsystems announced on February 12, 2008 that it would buy innotek, citing more than four million downloads since January 2007, and completed the purchase on February 20 to bring VirtualBox into its xVM family as the desktop counterpart to xVM Server. Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun on January 27, 2010, and VirtualBox became an Oracle product. VirtualBox 4.0, in December 2010, reorganized the software into an open-source base package and separately licensed Extension Packs.

Oracle moved the base package from GPLv2 to GPLv3 for VirtualBox 7.0 in October 2022, because newer Qt versions required it. Version 7.1 in September 2024 brought Arm virtualization to Apple silicon Macs, and 7.2 in August 2025 added Windows on Arm hosts and moved the NVMe controller emulation into the open-source base package.

Why it’s built this way

An open-source base with a proprietary add-on
innotek opened the core under the GPL in 2007 but kept selling extra features. Since 4.0 those features live in a separately licensed Extension Pack, so the base package can be freely redistributed while Oracle charges businesses for the extras.
A hosted hypervisor rather than bare metal
VirtualBox targets developers’ laptops and desktops: it runs alongside existing applications and uses the same file formats on every host OS, so a VM moves between Windows, macOS and Linux machines.
Drivers inside the guest
Emulated hardware alone gives only basic video and a captured mouse. The Guest Additions, installed in the guest, add the integration desktop users expect: seamless mouse, resizing, shared folders and clipboard.
GPLv3 from 7.0
The commit that changed the license files in August 2022 says GPLv3 was required for compatibility with the license of Qt 5.7 and later, which the GUI uses.

Timeline

  1. 2007

    innotek releases VirtualBox 1.3.2 under the GPL in January

  2. 2008

    Sun announces the purchase of innotek on February 12 and completes it on February 20

  3. 2010

    Oracle completes its purchase of Sun in January; 4.0 splits off the Extension Pack in December

  4. 2022

    7.0 in October, the first release under GPLv3

  5. 2024

    7.1 in September runs Arm VMs on Apple silicon Macs

  6. 2025

    7.2 in August adds Windows on Arm hosts

Sources10 · facts checked 11 October 2026

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