Students lesson assignment: What do you use as a test lab for your IT courses?
IT students new and old, one tool that almost everyone agrees that you must have is a virtualization software. A program that allows a single host computer to run multiple virtual guest machines with different operating systems.
Whether you’re doing college courses or take classes for IT exams, get yourself a copy of VirtualBox or VMware Workstation Pro.
These two programs will help you greatly in pursuing your goals. This brief tutorial shows you how to get and install VirtualBox on Windows systems.
We covered the same topic for Ubuntu systems. You can access that tutorial below.
Unlike Ubuntu, VirtualBox is easy to install on Windows systems. It is as easy as installing most programs on Windows computers. Just download the executable, run and install.
Step 1 : Downloading / Installing VirtualBox
VirtualBox can be downloaded from the following download page.
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Select a copy for Windows platform and download/run. As usual, install with the default options including all the selected features shown below.
When you get a prompt to install network interfaces, choose Yes and continue
Next, click the Install button
You may also get a prompt to trust this software from Oracle Corporation. Click Install and continue.
After that, VirtualBox should install. After installing, your first task is to launch the program and install VirtualBox’s extension pack.
The extension pack extend the functionality of VirtualBox base package. It provides the following enhancements to VirtualBox:
- Virtual USB 2.0 (EHCI) device
- Virtual USB 3.0 (xHCI) device
- VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support
- Host webcam passthrough
- Intel PXE boot ROM.
- Experimental support for PCI passthrough on Linux hosts
- Disk image encryption with AES algorithm
To install the extension pack, go back to VirtualBox’s download page , download and save the current pack for all supported platforms
After downloading and saving the latest extension pack, open VirtualBox on your Windows machine and navigate to File –> Preferences
Then select Extensions –> hit the browse arrow button to browse/select and install the pack.
After installing the extension pack, you’re all good to go. You can now begin creating virtual machines (guest). This is how you install VirtualBox on Windows systems.
Enjoy!