Virtual Box - By Yagna Pant

For the last few months, I have been playing with Virtual Box from Sun/Oracle as the virtualization platform for my laptop. To those not familiar with the technology Virtualization in a very simplistic term, allows to run many operating systems on the same physical hardware. As an example on a Windows XP laptop/desktop hardware (host), it is possible to install most of the operating systems (as guests) such as Linux, Solaris, and different flavors of Windows: Windows 3.1,Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, etc. It is also possible to run multiple guest instances of the same operating system (such as Windows XP) on the same physical hardware.

After a brief introduction, the obvious question then becomes: as a home user, what are some of the typical use cases for leveraging Virtual Box? Here are a few of my use cases:

One of my friends recently gave a perfectly working but 8 years old scanner to me. While trying to install Windows XP driver for the scanner on my computer, I found out that the manufacturer only supported the scanner on Windows 3.1 platform. It also did not make any sense to obtain a separate computer with Windows 3.1 operating system just to scan a few pictures/document a few times in a week or month. So I installed Virtual Box on my XP laptop, Windows 3.1 as the guest operating system and the driver for the scanner. These days I only start the Windows 3.1 system when I need to use the scanner.

Because of so many attacks, internet security experts, these days, advise to use a separate computer for doing web related financial transactions (ebay, amazon, web banking, etc.) and other personal finance activities such as tax returns. I have created another XP guest instance solely for the purpose of web transactions and do not use this instance for general browsing including emails.

The third and final use case is to use Virtual Box as the test bed for running new applications. Before installing any new applications on my main XP instance, I first want to validate whether the new application would meet my requirement. I do not prefer to install the new application on the primary machine to prevent the main appliance from getting cluttered. If you are interested, Virtual Box is available for free download via the following web site: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads