In the case of Windows guests, I say ‘don’t necessarily need’ because it might be required in some cases. You might decide to use VRDE and enable its Remote Desktop server if you want to use RDP to connect to a Linux VM. But if you are connecting to a Windows guest, you don’t necessarily need VRDE and if you are not using VRDE, you don’t need to configure the Remote Display settings in VirtualBox Manager for the guest VM. VirtualBox has a feature called the VirtualBox Remote Desktop Extension (VRDE) and it is only available if you download and install the VirtualBox Extension Pack. And naturally, you might want to access a VirtualBox VM from devices other than on which the guest VM is hosted. Connecting to a VirtualBox VM using Remote Desktop is the easiest way around the problem. There are also some other problems to be aware of like trying to use VMs with a large screen resolution and installing 64-bit OS guests if another hypervisor, such as Hyper-V, is also installed on the system.īut primarily the main reason that I wanted to connect via Remote Desktop initially was because it isn’t possible to use higher display resolutions in VirtualBox VMs when accessing them using VirtualBox Manager. But in addition to some issues with network performance in Windows guests, which I address in a separate article, enabling access to virtual machines (VM) using Remote Desktop isn’t as straight forward as with Hyper-V. I can’t say that one is necessarily better than the other – it’s swings and roundabouts. I switched from client Hyper-V to VirtualBox earlier this year and it has mainly been a good experience. Oracle VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor that is popular on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Solaris.

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