Table of Contents
As installation of VirtualBox varies depending on your host operating system, we provide installation instructions in four separate chapters for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris, respectively.
For the various versions of Windows that we support as host operating systems, please refer to Section 1.4, “Supported host operating systems”.
In addition, Windows Installer 1.1 or higher must be present on your system. This should be the case if you have all recent Windows updates installed.
The VirtualBox installation can be started
either by double-clicking on its executable file (contains both 32- and 64-bit architectures)
or by entering
VirtualBox-<version>-<revision>-Win.exe -extract
on the command line. This will extract both installers into a temporary directory in which you'll then find the usual .MSI files. Then you can do a
msiexec /i VirtualBox-<version>-<revision>-MultiArch_<x86|amd64>.msi
to perform the installation.
In either case, this will display the installation welcome dialog and allow you to choose where to install VirtualBox to and which components to install. In addition to the VirtualBox application, the following components are available:
This package contains special drivers for your Windows host that VirtualBox requires to fully support USB devices inside your virtual machines.
This package contains extra networking drivers for your Windows host that VirtualBox needs to support Bridged Networking (to make your VM's virtual network cards accessible from other machines on your physical network).
This package contains Python scripting support for the VirtualBox API (see Chapter 11, VirtualBox programming interfaces). For this to work, an already working Windows Python installation on the system is required.
Python version ≥ 2.6 is required. Since VirtualBox 5.1 Python 3 is also supported.
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Depending on your Windows configuration, you may see warnings about "unsigned drivers" or similar. Please select "Continue" on these warnings as otherwise VirtualBox might not function correctly after installation.
The installer will create a "VirtualBox" group in the Windows "Start" menu which allows you to launch the application and access its documentation.
With standard settings, VirtualBox will be installed for all users on the local system. In case this is not wanted, you have to invoke the installer by first extracting it by using
VirtualBox.exe -extract
and then do as follows:
VirtualBox.exe -msiparams ALLUSERS=2
or
msiexec /i VirtualBox-<version>-MultiArch_<x86|amd64>.msi ALLUSERS=2
on the extracted .MSI files. This will install VirtualBox only for the current user.
If you do not want to install all features of VirtualBox, you can
set the optional ADDLOCAL parameter to
explicitly name the features to be installed. The following features are
available:
Main binaries of VirtualBox.
This feature must not be absent since it contains the minimum set of files to have working VirtualBox installation.
USB support.
All networking support; includes the VBoxNetworkFlt and VBoxNetworkAdp features (see below).
Bridged networking support.
Host-only networking support.
Python support.
Python version ≥ 2.6 is required. Since VirtualBox 5.1 Python 3 is also supported.
For example, to only install USB support along with the main binaries, do a:
VirtualBox.exe -msiparams ADDLOCAL=VBoxApplication,VBoxUSB
or
msiexec /i VirtualBox-<version>-MultiArch_<x86|amd64>.msi ADDLOCAL=VBoxApplication,VBoxUSB
The user is able to choose between NDIS5 and NDIS6 host network filters drivers during
the installation. This is realized via a command line parameter
NETWORKTYPE.
The NDIS6 driver is default for Windows Vista and later. For older Windows versions,
the installer will automatically select the NDIS5 driver and this cannot be changed.
For Windows Vista and later the user can force to install the (legacy) NDIS5 host
network filter driver using NETWORKTYPE=NDIS5. For
example, to install the NDIS5 driver on Windows 7, do
VirtualBox.exe -msiparams NETWORKTYPE=NDIS5
or
msiexec /i VirtualBox-<version>-MultiArch_<x86|amd64>.msi NETWORKTYPE=NDIS5
As VirtualBox uses the standard Microsoft Windows installer, VirtualBox can be safely uninstalled at any time by choosing the program entry in the "Add/Remove Programs" applet in the Windows Control Panel.
Unattended installations can be performed using the standard MSI support.
The following public properties can be specified via MSI API,
VirtualBox.exe -msiparams NAME=VALUE [...]
or
msiexec /i VirtualBox-<version>-MultiArch_<x86|amd64>.msi NAME=VALUE [...]
to control additional behavior and/or features of the Windows host installer:
Specifies whether or not a VirtualBox icon on the desktop should be created.
Set to 1 to enable,
0 to disable. Default is 1.
Specifies whether or not a VirtualBox icon in the Quick Launch Bar should be created.
Set to 1 to enable,
0 to disable. Default is 1.
Specifies whether or not the file extensions .vbox, .vbox-extpack, .ovf, .ova, .vdi, .vmdk, .vhd and .vdd should be associated with VirtualBox. Files of these types then will be opened with VirtualBox.
Set to 1 to enable,
0 to disable. Default is 1.
Specifies whether or not VirtualBox should be started right after successful installation.
Set to 1 to enable,
0 to disable. Default is 1.
For Mac OS X hosts, VirtualBox ships in a disk image
(dmg) file. Perform the following
steps:
Double-click on that file to have its contents mounted.
A window will open telling you to double click on the
VirtualBox.mpkg installer file
displayed in that window.
This will start the installer, which will allow you to select where to install VirtualBox to.
After installation, you can find a VirtualBox icon in the "Applications" folder in the Finder.
To uninstall VirtualBox, open the disk image (dmg) file again and double-click on the uninstall icon contained therein.
To perform a non-interactive installation of VirtualBox you can use the command line version of the installer application.
Mount the disk image (dmg) file as described in the normal installation or use the following command line:
hdiutil attach /path/to/VirtualBox-xyz.dmg
Then open a terminal session and execute:
sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.pkg -target /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD
For the various versions of Linux that we support as host operating systems, please refer to Section 1.4, “Supported host operating systems”.
You will need to install the following packages on your Linux system before starting the installation (some systems will do this for you automatically when you install VirtualBox):
Qt 5.3.2 or higher (Qt 5.6.2 or higher recommended);
SDL 1.2.7 or higher (this graphics library is typically called
libsdl or similar).
To be precise, these packages are only required if you want to
run the VirtualBox graphical user interfaces. In particular,
VirtualBox, the graphical VirtualBox
manager, requires both Qt and SDL;
VBoxSDL, our simplified GUI, requires
only SDL. By contrast, if you only want to run
VBoxHeadless, neither Qt nor SDL are
required.
In order to run other operating systems in virtual machines
alongside your main operating system, VirtualBox needs to integrate
very tightly into the system. To do this it installs a "driver"
module called vboxdrv which does
a lot of that work into the system kernel, which is the part of
the operating system which controls your processor and physical
hardware. Without this kernel module, you can still use the
VirtualBox manager to configure virtual machines, but they will not
start. It also installs network drivers called
vboxnetflt and
vboxnetadp which let virtual machines
make more use of your computer's network capabilities and are needed
for any virtual machine networking beyond the basic "NAT" mode.
Since distributing driver modules separately from the kernel
is not something which Linux supports well, we create the modules
on the system where they will be used. This usually means first
installing software packages from the distribution which are needed
for the "build" process. Normally, these will be the GNU compiler
(GCC), GNU Make (make) and packages containing "header files" for
your kernel - and making sure that all system updates are
installed and that the system is running the most up-to-date
kernel included in the distribution. The running kernel
and the header files must be updated to matching versions.
We will give some instructions for common distributions. For most
of them you will want to start by finding the version name of your
kernel using the command
uname -r in a terminal. They
assume that you have not changed too much from the original
installation, particularly not installed a different kernel type.
If you have then you will need to determine yourself what to set
up.
With Debian and Ubuntu-based distributions, you
must install the right version of the
linux-headers, usually
whichever of linux-headers-generic
, linux-headers-amd64
, linux-headers-i686
or linux-headers-i686-pae
best matches the kernel version name;
and if it exists the linux-kbuild
package. Basic Ubuntu releases should have the right
packages installed by default.
On Fedora, Redhat, Oracle Linux and many other
RPM-based systems, the kernel version sometimes has
a code of letters or a word close to the end of the
version name, for example "uek" for the Oracle
Enterprise kernel or "default" or "desktop" for the
standard SUSE kernels. In this case the package name is
kernel-uek-devel or
equivalent. If there is no such code, it is usually
kernel-devel.
On older SUSE and openSUSE Linux, you must install
the kernel-source
and kernel-syms
packages.
If you suspect that something has gone wrong with module installation, check that your system is set up as described above and try running (as root) the following command:
rcvboxdrv setup
VirtualBox is available in a number of package formats native to various common Linux distributions (see Section 1.4, “Supported host operating systems” for details). In addition, there is an alternative generic installer (.run) which should work on most Linux distributions. The generic installer packages are built on EL5 systems and thus require reasonable old versions of glibc (version 2.5) and other system libraries.
First, download the appropriate package for your distribution.
The following examples assume that you are installing to a 32-bit
Ubuntu Wily system. Use dpkg to
install the Debian package:
sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-5.0_5.2.4_Ubuntu_wily_i386.deb
The installer will also try to build kernel modules suitable for
the current running kernel. If the build process is not successful you
will be shown a
warning and the package will be left unconfigured. Please have a look
at /var/log/vbox-install.log to find
out why the compilation failed. You may have to install the
appropriate Linux kernel headers (see Section 2.3.2, “The VirtualBox driver modules”). After correcting any problems, do
sudo rcvboxdrv setup
This will start a second attempt to build the module.
If a suitable kernel module was found in the package or the module was successfully built, the installation script will attempt to load that module. If this fails, please see Section 12.8.1, “Linux kernel module refuses to load” for further information.
Once VirtualBox has been successfully installed and configured, you can start it by selecting "VirtualBox" in your start menu or from the command line (see Section 2.3.5, “Starting VirtualBox on Linux”).
The alternative generic installer performs the following steps:
It unpacks the application files to the target directory,
/opt/VirtualBox/
which cannot be changed.
It builds the VirtualBox kernel modules
(vboxdrv,
vboxnetflt and
vboxnetadp) and installs
them.
It creates
/sbin/rcvboxdrv, an init
script to start the VirtualBox kernel module.
It creates a new system group called
vboxusers.
It creates symbolic links in
/usr/bin to the a shell script
(/opt/VirtualBox/VBox) which does
some sanity checks and dispatches to the actual executables,
VirtualBox,
VBoxSDL,
VBoxVRDP,
VBoxHeadless and
VBoxManage
It creates
/etc/udev/rules.d/60-vboxdrv.rules,
a description file for udev, if that is present, which makes the
USB devices accessible to all users in the
vboxusers group.
It writes the installation directory to
/etc/vbox/vbox.cfg.
The installer must be executed as root with either
install or
uninstall as the first
parameter.
sudo ./VirtualBox.run install
Or if you do not have the "sudo" command available, run the following as root instead:
./VirtualBox.run install
After that you need to put every user which should be able to
access USB devices from VirtualBox guests in the group
vboxusers, either through the GUI
user management tools or by running the following command as
root:
sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers username
The usermod command of some
older Linux distributions does not support the
-a option (which adds the user to
the given group without affecting membership of other groups). In
this case, find out the current group memberships with the
groups command and add all these
groups in a comma-separated list to the command line after the
-G option, e.g. like this:
usermod -G group1,group2,vboxusers
username.
If, for any reason, you cannot use the shell script installer described previously, you can also perform a manual installation. Invoke the installer like this:
./VirtualBox.run --keep --noexec
This will unpack all the files needed for installation in the
directory install under the current
directory. The VirtualBox application files are contained in
VirtualBox.tar.bz2 which you can
unpack to any directory on your system. For example:
sudo mkdir /opt/VirtualBox sudo tar jxf ./install/VirtualBox.tar.bz2 -C /opt/VirtualBox
or as root:
mkdir /opt/VirtualBox tar jxf ./install/VirtualBox.tar.bz2 -C /opt/VirtualBox
The sources for VirtualBox's kernel module are provided in the
src directory. To build the module,
change to the directory and issue
make
If everything builds correctly, issue the following command to install the module to the appropriate module directory:
sudo make install
In case you do not have sudo, switch the user account to root and perform
make install
The VirtualBox kernel module needs a device node to operate. The
above make command will tell you how to create the device node,
depending on your Linux system. The procedure is slightly different
for a classical Linux setup with a
/dev directory, a system with the now
deprecated devfs and a modern Linux
system with udev.
On certain Linux distributions, you might experience difficulties building the module. You will have to analyze the error messages from the build system to diagnose the cause of the problems. In general, make sure that the correct Linux kernel sources are used for the build process.
Note that the /dev/vboxdrv
kernel module device node must be owned by root:root and must be
read/writable only for the user.
Next, you will have to install the system initialization script for the kernel module:
cp /opt/VirtualBox/vboxdrv.sh /sbin/rcvboxdrv
(assuming
you installed VirtualBox to the
/opt/VirtualBox directory) and
activate the initialization script using the right method for your
distribution. You should create VirtualBox's configuration
file:
mkdir /etc/vbox echo INSTALL_DIR=/opt/VirtualBox > /etc/vbox/vbox.cfg
and, for convenience, create the following symbolic links:
ln -sf /opt/VirtualBox/VBox.sh /usr/bin/VirtualBox ln -sf /opt/VirtualBox/VBox.sh /usr/bin/VBoxManage ln -sf /opt/VirtualBox/VBox.sh /usr/bin/VBoxHeadless ln -sf /opt/VirtualBox/VBox.sh /usr/bin/VBoxSDL
Before updating or uninstalling VirtualBox, you must terminate any virtual machines which are currently running and exit the VirtualBox or VBoxSVC applications. To update VirtualBox, simply run the installer of the updated version. To uninstall VirtualBox, invoke the installer like this:
sudo ./VirtualBox.run uninstall
or as root
./VirtualBox.run uninstall
. Starting with version 2.2.2, you can uninstall the .run package by invoking
/opt/VirtualBox/uninstall.sh
To manually uninstall VirtualBox, simply undo the steps in the manual installation in reverse order.
The Debian packages will request some user feedback when
installed for the first time. The debconf system is used to perform
this task. To prevent any user interaction during installation,
default values can be defined. A file
vboxconf can contain the following
debconf settings:
virtualbox virtualbox/module-compilation-allowed boolean true virtualbox virtualbox/delete-old-modules boolean true
The first line allows compilation of the vboxdrv kernel module if no module was found for the current kernel. The second line allows the package to delete any old vboxdrv kernel modules compiled by previous installations.
These default settings can be applied with
debconf-set-selections vboxconf
prior to the installation of the VirtualBox Debian package.
In addition there are some common configuration options that can be set prior to the installation, described in Section 2.3.3.7, “Automatic installation options”.
The .rpm format does not provide a configuration system comparable to the debconf system. See Section 2.3.3.7, “Automatic installation options” for how to set some common installation options provided by VirtualBox.
To configure the installation process of our .deb and .rpm
packages, you can create a response file named
/etc/default/virtualbox. The
automatic generation of the udev rule can be prevented by the
following setting:
INSTALL_NO_UDEV=1
The creation of the group vboxusers can be prevented by
INSTALL_NO_GROUP=1
If the line
INSTALL_NO_VBOXDRV=1
is specified, the
package installer will not try to build the
vboxdrv kernel module if no module
fitting the current kernel was found.
The Linux installers create the system user group
vboxusers during installation. Any
system user who is going to use USB devices from VirtualBox guests must
be a member of that group. A user can be made a member of the group
vboxusers through the GUI user/group
management or at the command line with
sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers username
The easiest way to start a VirtualBox program is by running the
program of your choice (VirtualBox,
VBoxManage,
VBoxSDL or
VBoxHeadless) from a terminal. These
are symbolic links to VBox.sh that
start the required program for you.
The following detailed instructions should only be of interest if
you wish to execute VirtualBox without installing it first. You should
start by compiling the vboxdrv kernel
module (see above) and inserting it into the Linux kernel. VirtualBox
consists of a service daemon (VBoxSVC)
and several application programs. The daemon is automatically started if
necessary. All VirtualBox applications will communicate with the daemon
through Unix local domain sockets. There can be multiple daemon
instances under different user accounts and applications can only
communicate with the daemon running under the user account as the
application. The local domain socket resides in a subdirectory of your
system's directory for temporary files called
.vbox-<username>-ipc. In case of
communication problems or server startup problems, you may try to remove
this directory.
All VirtualBox applications
(VirtualBox,
VBoxSDL,
VBoxManage and
VBoxHeadless) require the VirtualBox
directory to be in the library path:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./VBoxManage showvminfo "Windows XP"
For the specific versions of Solaris that we support as host operating systems, please refer to Section 1.4, “Supported host operating systems”.
If you have a previously installed instance of VirtualBox on your Solaris host, please uninstall it first before installing a new instance. Refer to Section 2.4.4, “Uninstallation” for uninstall instructions.
VirtualBox is available as a standard Solaris package. Download
the VirtualBox SunOS package which includes the 64-bit
versions of VirtualBox. The installation must be performed as
root and from the global zone as the VirtualBox installer
loads kernel drivers which cannot be done from non-global zones. To
verify which zone you are currently in, execute the
zonename command. Execute the following
commands:
gunzip -cd VirtualBox-5.2.4-SunOS.tar.gz | tar xvf -
Starting with VirtualBox 3.1 the VirtualBox kernel package is no longer a separate package and has been integrated into the main package. Install the VirtualBox package using:
pkgadd -d VirtualBox-5.2.4-SunOS.pkg
The installer will then prompt you to enter the package you wish to install. Choose "1" or "all" and proceed. Next the installer will ask you if you want to allow the postinstall script to be executed. Choose "y" and proceed as it is essential to execute this script which installs the VirtualBox kernel module. Following this confirmation the installer will install VirtualBox and execute the postinstall setup script.
Once the postinstall script has been executed your installation is
now complete. You may now safely delete the uncompressed package and
autoresponse files from your system.
VirtualBox would be installed in
/opt/VirtualBox.
If you need to use VirtualBox from non-global zones, please read Section 2.4.6, “Configuring a zone for running VirtualBox”.
Starting with VirtualBox 4.1, the installer creates the system
user group vboxuser during installation
for Solaris hosts that support the USB features required by VirtualBox.
Any system user who is going to use USB devices from VirtualBox guests
must be a member of this group. A user can be made a member of this
group through the GUI user/group management or at the command line by
executing as root:
usermod -G vboxuser username
Note that adding an active user to that group will require that user to log out and back in again. This should be done manually after successful installation of the package.
The easiest way to start a VirtualBox program is by running the
program of your choice (VirtualBox,
VBoxManage,
VBoxSDL or
VBoxHeadless) from a terminal. These
are symbolic links to VBox.sh that
start the required program for you.
Alternatively, you can directly invoke the required programs from
/opt/VirtualBox. Using the links
provided is easier as you do not have to type the full path.
You can configure some elements of the
VirtualBox Qt GUI such as fonts and
colours by executing VBoxQtconfig from
the terminal.
Uninstallation of VirtualBox on Solaris requires root permissions. To perform the uninstallation, start a root terminal session and execute:
pkgrm SUNWvbox
After confirmation, this will remove VirtualBox from your system.
If you are uninstalling VirtualBox version 3.0 or lower, you need to remove the VirtualBox kernel interface package, execute:
pkgrm SUNWvboxkern
To perform a non-interactive installation of VirtualBox we have
provided a response file named
autoresponse that the installer will
use for responses to inputs rather than ask them from you.
Extract the tar.gz package as described in the normal installation. Then open a root terminal session and execute:
pkgadd -d VirtualBox-5.2.4-SunOS-x86 -n -a autoresponse SUNWvbox
To perform a non-interactive uninstallation, open a root terminal session and execute:
pkgrm -n -a /opt/VirtualBox/autoresponse SUNWvbox
Assuming that VirtualBox has already been installed into your zone, you need to give the zone access to VirtualBox's device node. This is done by performing the following steps. Start a root terminal and execute:
zonecfg -z vboxzone
Replace "vboxzone" with the name of the zone in which you intend to run VirtualBox.
Inside the zonecfg prompt add the
device resource and
match properties to the zone. Here's
how it can be done:
zonecfg:vboxzone>add device zonecfg:vboxzone:device>set match=/dev/vboxdrv zonecfg:vboxzone:device>end zonecfg:vboxzone>add device zonecfg:vboxzone:device>set match=/dev/vboxdrvu zonecfg:vboxzone:device>end zonecfg:vboxzone>exit
If you are running VirtualBox 2.2.0 or above on Solaris 11 or
above, you may add a device for /dev/vboxusbmon
too, similar to what was shown above. This does not apply to Solaris 10
hosts due to lack of USB support.
If you are not using sparse root zones, you will need to loopback
mount /opt/VirtualBox from the global zone
(specified below using the dir attribute) into
the non-global zone at the same path (specified using the
special attribute). For example:
zonecfg:vboxzone>add fs zonecfg:vboxzone:device>set dir=/opt/VirtualBox zonecfg:vboxzone:device>set special=/opt/VirtualBox zonecfg:vboxzone:device>set type=lofs zonecfg:vboxzone:device>end zonecfg:vboxzone>exit
Next reboot the zone using zoneadm
and you should be able to run VirtualBox from within the configured zone.