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xVM VirtualBox is supports a wide range of host platforms and guest operating systems. In this chapter, the concepts of host and guest operating systems will be covered together with a list explained, followed by lists of currently supported operating systems within each category.

In the chapter entitled [[An Overview of VirtualBox 2]] the fact that VirtualBox runs on top of a host operating system was explained. In the context of VirtualBox, therefore, a ''supported host operating system'' is an operating system running directly on the hardware of the host computer which is officially supported by Sun Microsystems for running the VirtualBox virtualization environment.  It is important to understand the distinction between a support supported and unsupported host operating system. Just because an operating system is not listed as a supported host operating system does not necessarily mean VirtualBox will not run on that platform. It does mean, however, that if any problems are encountered using the operating system, there will be no help offered from the authors to resolve the problem.

Guest operating systems are the operating systems which run within VirtualBox virtual machines. The list of supported guest operating systems is much larger than the list of supported host operating systems. As with host operating systems, just because an operating systems is not listed as a supported guest does not necessarily mean it will not run. In fact, in the case of guest operating systems there is a good chance that even unsupported guest operating systems will still run within a virtual machine. There are, of course, limitations to this rule. It is not possible, for example, to run MacOS X in a virtual machine for the simple reason that MacOS X relies on specific proprietary Apple hardware and firmware which is not available in a VirtualBox virtual machine.

In terms of Linux distributions not listed in the above table, VirtualBox should run on any distribution based on version 2.6.x of the Linux kernel. Support for distributions based on version 2.4 of the Linux kernel are not supported by recent versions of VirtualBox.