1 Introduction
– Full ACPI support.
The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface
(ACPI) is fully supported by VirtualBox. This eases cloning of PC images
from real machines or third-party virtual machines into VirtualBox. With its
unique
ACPI power status support,
VirtualBox can even report to ACPI-
aware guest operating systems the power status of the host. For mobile
systems running on battery, the guest can thus enable energy saving and
notify the user of the remaining power (e.g. in fullscreen modes).
– Multiscreen resolutions.
VirtualBox virtual machines support screen res-
olutions many times that of a physical screen, allowing them to be spread
over a large number of screens attached to the host system.
– Built-in iSCSI support.
This unique feature allows you to connect a vir-
tual machine directly to an iSCSI storage server without going through the
host system. The VM accesses the iSCSI target directly without the extra
overhead that is required for virtualizing hard disks in container files. For
details, see chapter
5.5
,
iSCSI servers
, page
80
.
– PXE Network boot.
The integrated virtual network cards of VirtualBox
fully support remote booting via the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE).
•
Multigeneration snapshots.
VirtualBox can save successive snapshots of the
state of the virtual machine. You can revert the virtual machine to the state of
any of the snapshots. For details, see chapter
3.4.4
,
Snapshots
, page
42
.
•
VRDP remote access.
You can run any virtual machine in a special VirtualBox
program that acts as a server for the VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol
(VRDP). With this unique feature, VirtualBox provides high-performance remote
access to any virtual machine. A custom RDP server has been built directly into
the virtualization layer and offers unprecedented performance and feature rich-
ness.
VRDP support is described in detail in chapter
7.4
,
Remote virtual machines
(VRDP support)
, page
93
.
On top of this special capacity, VirtualBox offers you more unique features:
– Extensible RDP authentication.
VirtualBox already supports Winlogon
on Windows and PAM on Linux for RDP authentication. In addition, it
includes an easy-to-use SDK which allows you to create arbitrary interfaces
for other methods of authentication; see chapter
9.3
,
Custom external VRDP
authentication
, page
129
for details.
– USB over RDP.
Via RDP virtual channel support, VirtualBox also allows
you to connect arbitrary USB devices locally to a virtual machine which is
running remotely on a VirtualBox RDP server; see chapter
7.4.3
,
Remote
USB
, page
97
for details.
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