How to Run a Virtual Computer Within Your Host OS with VirtualBox

By Alex Long

With the computer's rapid increases in power and efficiency, computer virtualization has taken the scene by storm. With virtualization software, and powerful enough computer hardware, your computer can run a virtual computer within itself. This effectively gives you multiple OS's on the host OS. This can be used for a lot of cool stuff that your computer would normally be limited by. Let's take a look at a few.

You can:

Run software from other platforms.
Run multiple OS's at the same time.
Chain VPNs.
Use it for testing software in a sandbox.
Sandbox a virus to study it.
Many more

With all of these reasons, why wouldn't a person want a virtual machine? Sadly, the common solution on the Windows platform is to spend a few hundred dollars on VMware. However, thanks to the awesome people at Oracle, we have a FREE alternative, which is actually better and more stable in my opinion. It's called VirtualBox.

In this Null Byte, we are going to install VirtualBox and prepare a virtual drive and resources for a Windows virtual machine. Let's get to it.

Download & Install VirtualBox

Download VirtualBox.
Navigate to the Downloads directory.
Double-click the installer.
Click through the Next > Next > Install GUI (only select and deselect options if you know what you are doing).
Run it.

Configure & Prepare VirtualBox for an OS Installation

Follow along with me here in this video tutorial for a quick and painless setup of a virtual drive in preparation to have an OS installed onto it.

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