VirtualBox is a tool of open source virtualization that lets you run Linux under Windows and vice versa.

VirtualBox creates a virtual drive on the hard disk where you install the operating system virtualized, which you can access as if you were actually running. This unit can have a fixed size (static) or variable (dynamic).

The setup wizard will prompt you to book a minimum of 64 MB of RAM for the virtualized operating system.

For now, you can virtualize operating systems are: Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6, os / 2 Warp, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, DOS / Windows 3.x and so on.

The benefits of virtualization are many: you can access and run an application from one operating system to another, create snapshots of the operating system that can be used to recover the system after an unexpected drop, save time and money on complicated hardware configurations, etc…