1 First steps 1.7 Creating your first virtual machine Click on the “New” button at the top of the VirtualBox Manager window. A wizard will pop up to guide you through setting up a new virtual machine (VM): On the following pages, the wizard will ask you for the bare minimum of information that is needed to create a VM, in particular: 1. The VM name will later be shown in the VM list of the VirtualBox Manager window, and it will be used for the VM’s files on disk. Even though any name could be used, keep in mind that once you have created a few VMs, you will appreciate if you have given your VMs rather informative names “My VM” would thus be less useful than “Windows XP SP2 with OpenOffice”. 2. For “Operating System Type”, select the operating system that you want to install later. The supported operating systems are grouped if you want to install something very un- usual that is not listed, select “Other”. Depending on your selection, VirtualBox will enable or disable certain VM settings that your guest operating system may require. This is partic- ularly important for 64-bit guests (see chapter 3.1.2, 64-bit guests, page 40). It is therefore recommended to always set it to the correct value. 3. On the next page, select the memory (RAM) that VirtualBox should allocate every time the virtual machine is started. The amount of memory given here will be taken away from your host machine and presented to the guest operating system, which will report this size as the (virtual) computer’s installed RAM. Note: Choose this setting carefully! The memory you give to the VM will not be available to your host OS while the VM is running, so do not specify more than you can spare. For example, if your host machine has 1 GB of RAM and you enter 512 MB as the amount of RAM for a particular virtual machine, while that VM is running, you will only have 512 MB left for all the other software on your host. If you run two VMs at the same time, even more memory will be allocated for the second VM (which may not even be able to start if that memory is not available). On the other hand, you should specify as much as your guest OS (and your applications) will require to run properly. A Windows XP guest will require at least a few hundred MB RAM to run properly, and Windows Vista will even refuse to install with less than 512 MB. Of course, if you want to run graphics-intensive applications in your VM, you may require even more RAM. 16