Glossary SMP Symmetrical Multiprocessing, meaning that the resources of a computer are shared be- tween several processors. These can either be several processor chips or, as is more com- mon with modern hardware, multiple CPU cores in one processor. T TAR A widely used file format for archiving. Originally, this stood for “Tape ARchive” and was already supported by very early Unix versions for backing up data on tape. The file format is still widely used today, for example, with OVF archives (with an .ova file extension) see chapter 1.12, Importing and exporting virtual machines, page 26. U UUID A Universally Unique Identifier – often also called GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) – is a string of numbers and letters which can be computed dynamically and is guaranteed to be unique. Generally, it is used as a global handle to identify entities. VirtualBox makes use of UUIDs to identify VMs, Virtual Disk Images (VDI files) and other entities. V VM Virtual Machine – a virtual computer that VirtualBox allows you to run on top of your actual hardware. See chapter 1.2, Some terminology, page 10 for details. VMM Virtual Machine Manager – the component of VirtualBox that controls VM execution. See chapter 10.2, VirtualBox executables and components, page 155 for a list of VirtualBox com- ponents. VRDE VirtualBox Remote Desktop Extension. This interface is built into VirtualBox to allow VirtualBox extension packages to supply remote access to virtual machines. A VirtualBox extension package by Oracle provides VRDP support see chapter 7.1, Remote display (VRDP support), page 90 for details. VRDP See RDP. VT-x The hardware virtualization features built into modern Intel processors. See chapter 10.3, Hardware vs. software virtualization, page 157. X XML The eXtensible Markup Language, a metastandard for all kinds of textual information. XML only specifies how data in the document is organized generally and does not prescribe how to semantically organize content. XPCOM Mozilla Cross Platform Component Object Model, a programming infrastructure devel- oped by the Mozilla browser project which is similar to Microsoft COM and allows appli- cations to provide a modular programming interface. VirtualBox makes use of XPCOM on Linux both internally and externally to provide a comprehensive API to third-party devel- opers. 269