We will now be installing Oracle VirtualBox on our Windows 10 Computer. VirtualBox is the software that I will be using to create virtual machines. I really enjoy using virtual machines for testing purposes and just to try out new Linux versions, create Linux and Windows servers for testing, and just because I find the entire virtual PC concept so fascinating.
There are other options out there for running virtual machines, but the laptop I was using a couple years ago did not support Microsoft Hyper-V, so VirtualBox was the first virtualization software that I used.
Maybe we should take a step back and try to quickly define what a virtual machine without going too deep. A virtual machine is simply a computer that exists within your existing computer. VirtualBox basically pretends to be a computer with all the hardware that you specify. When you install Linux or Windows within VirtualBox your install program thinks that it’s running on an actual physical computer. If that sounded a bit convoluted, I’m sorry. Stick with me and all will be revealed.
Getting to know your computer
The first thing we need to do is become acquainted with computer that we are using. The main thing we need to know is whether we are using a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system, and how much memory we have to work with.
This is important because if we have a 32-bit operating system, and not a 64-bit computer running a 64 bit operating system, we cannot create a 64-bit virtual machine. I could go really geeky with this, but let’s just say that almost all recent computers are 64 bit.
You may also want to go into your computer’s BIOS settings and see if hardware virtualization is available and turned on, but that goes beyond the scope of what we are doing here. Hardware virtualization can make things run a lot better, but is not completely necessary to run VirtualBox. I would suggest you look up how to do it on your computer if you feel comfortable getting into your system setup.
Let’s get started on how to find out what sort of operating system you have. Click on the start flag and choose “Settings”. In the screen that comes up, choose “System”. Scroll all the way to the bottom and choose “About”.
In the window that opens, you should see two things that are rather important to know, one is your installed RAM. In the illustration you will note that I have 10.0 GB. The other is the System Type. In the illustration below, you will see that I have a 64-bit operation system with an 64-bit processor. These are good. Now we know we can create 64-bit virtual machines.
If your computer is not 64-bit, then you will just have to stick with 32-bit versions of operating systems to install. This will be a slight problem later as the newest versions of the Centos operating system and many other operating systems no longer support 32 bit systems.
If you also have less than 3.5 GB of ram, you may also run into a problem later, but I wouldn’t fret too much unless you are actually less than 2 GB, like the small tablets that I use quite often. Virtual machines use your systems RAM for themselves, so if I create a virtual machine on this machine with its 9.88 GB usable RAM, and the virtual machine is set up to use 2.0 GB of RAM, then I will have 7.88 left available to my computer. Luckily, virtual machines seem to take less ram than the advertised minimum hardware requirements for a physical machine.
Now that we know a bit about our physical machine, we can download and install the version of VirtualBox that will work with our machine.
Downloading VirtualBox
VirtualBox is available at VirtualBox.org and is free to use. To obtain your copy, go to www.virtualbox.org. As websites seem to be a bit fluid and change quite often, your exact procedures after you get there may be different than what you see here. Find where it says “Downloads” and it should take you to a page where it lists the different versions for your system. As we are here to install on Windows 10, let’s choose the version for Windows Hosts. Right now, the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are the same installer, so let’s choose that one.
When you choose that one, the Edge browser will ask to save or run the download. I like to download first and then run when I want to, but maybe that’s just me. As I have a somewhat slower connection, we have a few minutes to do some other things, so let’s talk a bit about hyper-v.
A few words on Hyper-V
A few terms you may hear tossed around is “Hyper-V”, hardware virtualization, Intel VT-x, and AMD-V technologies. Let’s take these one at a time.
Hyper-V is Microsoft’s virtualization technology that comes with certain versions of Windows. It is big, powerful, incredibly flexible, and I don’t use it other than on a few enterprise servers. You may be wondering why we don’t use that for our virtual machines. All I can say is that I have experience with VirtualBox as it would run on my computers running the Windows 7 Home versions and my Linux computers. The other reason is that there are a lot of good training materials, blogs, and videos out there for it, and it’s rather easy to use.
Hardware virtualization
Hardware virtualization is accomplished by using special circuits found in the hardware in your physical computer. Your computer may or may not support it, but if you enable it, it seems to make the virtual machines run a bit smoother. Luckily, VirtualBox no longer requires hardware virtualization technology to run properly. So, if you are not sure if your virtualization hardware is turned on, after you download VirtualBox, reboot your computer, go into your BIOS settings (usually by pressing Esc, delete, or some other key when your computer first comes back on) and see if you have hardware virtualization available as an option under some sort of advanced settings. Just play around until you find it, or go online and find out if your machine actually supports it and how to turn it on.
Intel VT-x and AMD-V hardware
The terms Intel VT-x and AMD-V are two of the technologies that computer manufacturers enable your hardware to share resources easily with virtual machines. One is for Intel processors; the other is for AMD processors. You may also hear some other versions of these terms like "V-Pro", but these are all marketing terms for the same class of hardware assisted virtualization technology.
I do want to mention again that VirtualBox does not require hardware virtualization to function properly, but may function better with it enabled. Let's get back to our install.
Installing VirtualBox
Now that we have downloaded the software, let’s get it installed. If you had to reboot to check your system for hardware virtualization, then you will need to find your downloaded VirtualBox. If you are using the Edge browser, you can click the strange version of a hamburger menu that will bring up the “Hub”, and then click the downward facing arrow. 
Click on the word VirtualBox and it will begin the installer. As of this writing, there’s no good way to tell that you have clicked on the download, it does not change color, or do anything else to tell you that it is starting until the installer window actually pops up. You may also get a security warning asking if you intended to install this software, so long as it’s the real version from virtualbox.org, just click OK.
Now you can step your way through the installer steps. From what I’ve seen, all of the defaults work fine. You will get a warning that your network connection may be affected for a bit. I have never had much trouble with this, even when streaming audio or video while installing.
I have never ran across an actual problem that was a “deal killer” when installing any newer version of VirtualBox, but it has been a while since I have tried to install it on any strange or under-powered machines. The installer seems to be very mature and just runs very well. The problem you will find on under-powered machines is the lack of processing power and RAM for your virtual machine.
Once your install is finished, go ahead and launch VirtualBox just to make sure all went well. There are a few changes that I like to make, just to keep things simple for me later.
Customizing VirtualBox
The main bit of customization that I do is defining my default locations for virtual machines. I have a computer that has a small but fast “C:” drive, and a large second drive that is for bulk storage. Due to the size of some of some of the machines that I create, I use this drive (“F:”) to store the virtual machine files, my ISO files (images of the installation DVDs for various operating systems), and a place to store other files that I will be sharing between the various virtual machines. Yes, we can share stuff between our physical machine and the virtual machines.
To set this up, click on “File”, then “Preferences”.
In the window that opens, you can change the “Default Machine Folder” setting to whatever you want to use. As you can see, I use a folder called F:\VMS.
That’s all of the customization that I do right out of the box, but it keeps everything in order. I just make sure that this folder is backed up to an external drive after I make virtual machines that I want to keep. I do not back this drive up to a cloud service just because of size.
I hope your VirtualBox software is running properly, and next time we will download and install a sample operating system in VirtualBox just to get an idea of how it is working.
Thank you,
Shawn
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