VirtualBox/Gast-Erweiterung/Windows

Guest Additions for Windows

The Oracle VM VirtualBox Windows Guest Additions are designed to be installed in a virtual machine running a Windows operating system. The following versions of Windows guests are supported:

• Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 (any service pack)
• Microsoft Windows 2000 (any service pack)
• Microsoft Windows XP (any service pack)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (any service pack)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008
• Microsoft Windows Vista (all editions)
• Microsoft Windows 7 (all editions)
• Microsoft Windows 8 (all editions)
• Microsoft Windows 10 RTM build 10240
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012

Installing the Windows Guest Additions

In the Devices menu in the virtual machine's menu bar, Oracle VM VirtualBox has a menu item Insert Guest Additions CD Image, which mounts the Guest Additions ISO file inside your virtual machine. A Windows guest should then automatically start the Guest Additions installer, which installs the Guest Additions on your Windows guest.

For other guest operating systems, or if automatic start of software on a CD is disabled, you need to do a manual start of the installer.

Note

For the basic Direct3D acceleration to work in a Windows guest, you have to install the WDDM video driver available for Windows Vista or later.

For Windows 8 and later, only the WDDM Direct3D video driver is available. For basic Direct3D acceleration to work in Windows XP guests, you have to install the Guest Additions in Safe Mode. See Chapter 14, Known Limitations for details.

If you prefer to mount the Guest Additions manually, you can perform the following steps:

1. Start the virtual machine in which you have installed Windows.
2. Select Optical Drives from the Devices menu in the virtual machine's menu bar and then Choose/Create a Disk Image. This displays the Virtual Media Manager, described in Section 5.3, “The Virtual Media Manager”.
3. In the Virtual Media Manager, click Add and browse your host file system for the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso file.
   • On a Windows host, this file is in the Oracle VM VirtualBox installation directory, usually in C:\Program files\Oracle\VirtualBox.
   • On Mac OS X hosts, this file is in the application bundle of Oracle VM VirtualBox. Right-click on the Oracle VM VirtualBox icon in Finder and choose Show Package Contents. The file is located in the Contents/MacOS folder.
   • On a Linux host, this file is in the additions folder where you installed Oracle VM VirtualBox, usually /opt/VirtualBox/.
   • On Oracle Solaris hosts, this file is in the additions folder where you installed Oracle VM VirtualBox, usually /opt/VirtualBox.
4. In the Virtual Media Manager, select the ISO file and click the Add button. This mounts the ISO file and presents it to your Windows guest as a CD-ROM.

Unless you have the Autostart feature disabled in your Windows guest, Windows will now autostart the Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions installation program from the Additions ISO. If the Autostart feature has been turned off, choose VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe from the CD/DVD drive inside the guest to start the installer.

The installer will add several device drivers to the Windows driver database and then invoke the hardware detection wizard.

Depending on your configuration, it might display warnings that the drivers are not digitally signed. You must confirm these in order to continue the installation and properly install the Additions.

After installation, reboot your guest operating system to activate the Additions.

Updating the Windows Guest Additions

Windows Guest Additions can be updated by running the installation program again. This replaces the previous Additions drivers with updated versions.

Alternatively, you can also open the Windows Device Manager and select Update Driver... for the following devices:

• Oracle VM VirtualBox Graphics Adapter
• Oracle VM VirtualBox System Device

For each, choose the option to provide your own driver, click Have Disk and navigate to the CD-ROM drive with the Guest Additions.

Unattended Installation

To avoid popups when performing an unattended installation of the Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions, the code signing certificates used to sign the drivers needs to be installed in the correct certificate stores on the guest operating system. Failure to do this will cause a typical Windows installation to display multiple dialogs asking whether you want to install a particular driver.

Note

On some Windows versions, such as Windows 2000 and Windows XP, the user intervention popups mentioned above are always displayed, even after importing the Oracle certificates.

Installing the code signing certificates on a Windows guest can be done automatically. Use the VBoxCertUtil.exe utility from the cert folder on the Guest Additions installation CD.

Use the following steps:

1. Log in as Administrator on the guest.
2. Mount the Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions .ISO.
3. Open a command line window on the guest and change to the cert folder on the Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions CD.
4. Run the following command: VBoxCertUtil.exe add-trusted-publisher vbox*.cer --root vbox*.cerThis command installs the certificates to the certificate store. When installing the same certificate more than once, an appropriate error will be displayed.

To allow for completely unattended guest installations, you can specify a command line parameter to the install launcher:

VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe /S

This automatically installs the right files and drivers for the corresponding platform, either 32-bit or 64-bit.

Note

By default on an unattended installation on a Vista or Windows 7 guest, there will be the XPDM graphics driver installed. This graphics driver does not support Windows Aero / Direct3D on the guest. Instead, the WDDM graphics driver needs to be installed. To select this driver by default, add the command line parameter /with_wddm when invoking the Windows Guest Additions installer. This is only required for Vista and Windows 7.

Note

For Windows Aero to run correctly on a guest, the guest's VRAM size needs to be configured to at least 128 MB.

For more options regarding unattended guest installations, consult the command line help by using the command:

VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe /?

Manual File Extraction

If you would like to install the files and drivers manually, you can extract the files from the Windows Guest Additions setup as follows:

VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe /extract

To explicitly extract the Windows Guest Additions for another platform than the current running one, such as 64-bit files on a 32-bit system, you must use the appropriate platform installer. Use VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86.exe or VBoxWindowsAdditions-amd64.exe with the /extract parameter.