FreeBSD: Complete Virtualization using VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a virtualization software,originally created by German software company innotek GmbH, purchased by Sun Microsystems, and now developed by Oracle Corporation as part of its family of virtualization products. It is installed on an existing host operating system; within this application, additional guest operating systems, each known as a Guest OS, can be loaded and run, each with its own virtual environment.

In this article I'll show you how to install VirtualBox under FreeBSD.

VirtualBox is available as a FreeBSD port and may be installed using the following commands:

cd /usr/ports/emulators/virtualbox-ose
make install clean

Make sure GuestAdditions is checked. GuestAdditions provide a number of useful features in guest operating systems, like mouse pointer integration and faster video rendering.

The port installs a kernel module in /boot/modules which must be loaded into the running kernel via kldload:

kldload vboxdrv

To ensure the module always gets loaded after a system reboot, add the following line to /boot/loader.conf:

vboxdrv_load="YES"

Add the following line to /etc/rc.conf and reboot the system afterwards:

vboxnet_enable="YES"

The vboxusers group is created during the installation of VirtualBox. All users that need access to VirtualBox will have to be added as members of this group:

pw groupmod vboxusers -m username

To launch VirtualBox, either select the VirtualBox item from your graphic environment's menu, or type the following command in a terminal:

VirtualBox

For more information on configuring and using VirtualBox, please visit the official website at http://www.virtualbox.org.