Table of Contents
This Open Source Edition contains most but not all features of the innotek Virtualbox product. Some of the features only present in the closed-source version available from http://virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads:
Remote Display Protocol (RDP) Server
This component implements a complete RDP server on top of the virtual hardware and allows users to connect to a virtual machine remotely using any RDP compatible client.
USB support
VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and supports passing through USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices to virtual machines.
USB over RDP
This is a combination of the RDP server and USB support allowing users to make USB devices available to virtual machines running remotely.
iSCSI initiator
VirtualBox contains a builtin iSCSI initiator making it possible to use iSCSI targets as virtual disks without the guest requiring support for iSCSI.
Emulation for Intel e1000 network device
By default VirtualBox uses NAT for the network interfaces of virtual machines and use an internal DHCP server to obtain an IP address. This works well but the disadvantage is that the machine will not have an IP address visible outside the VM and so you cannot connect to it from the host system or from other systems.
By attaching the VM's interface to "Host Interface" and creating a corresponding tun/tap interface the VM can be made visible on the local network.
The name for such an interface must start with
vbox.
There are different ways to create an interface:
In this case you only need to "define" an interface for use by a particular user once. All defined interfaces are "remembered" in the file /etc/vbox/interfaces and recreated by the VirtualBox init script every time the host system is booted.
You can of course create multiple interfaces per users, but all interfaces should have unique names.
Starting with version 1.5.6-3, the virtualbox-ose package
contains helper scripts that allow tap interfaces for
host-based networking to be configured from
/etc/network/interfaces.
The owner for this interface can be
configured using the virtualbox-user
keyword.
Figure 2. Configuration of tun/tap interface for VirtualBox
iface vbox0 inet static
address 192.168.3.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
virtualbox-user USER
Unfortunately, the configuration files between version version 1.4.0-svn4130 and 1.5.0 the configuration files are incompatible.
In order to fix this issue please delete the complete
<Uart> section in your
~/.VirtualBox/Machines/NAME/NAME.xml file.
Please see the VirtualBox page in the Debian Wiki for additional or updated information.