Oracle VM VirtualBox also features versatile hardware support, so that you can create virtual machines that have multiple virtual CPUs (regardless of how many cores you have physically on your PC), that recognize USB devices or ones that come with multi-screen resolutions, integrated iSCSI support and PXE network boot. See 'About VirtualBox' for an introduction. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.

If you do figure out how to get 4.3 working with HP Network Simulator, let me know.VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. I’m not a big VirtualBox user, so I’m not worried about missing any 4.3 features. I was able to go back to 4.2.18, then upgrade to 4.2.26 (the latest 4.2.x version currently available). I have also tried installing VirtualBox 4.2.18, installing HP Network Simulator, then later upgrading VirtualBox. I’m sure there’s no real reason for requiring 4.2.18, it’s probably just an oversight, where the installer code is looking for a specific version, not a minimum version. Install 4.2.18, and then it allow you to install the HP Network Simulator. I couldn’t even get it working with later versions of 4.2. That’s right - the docs say 4.2.18 or later, but it seems that it won’t install unless you install EXACTLY 4.2.18. The problem is that if you install 4.3.14, and then try to install the Network Simulator, you’ll get this pop-up: There is one wrinkle though - the documentation states that it requires “Oracle VM VirtualBox Release 4.2.18 or later.” At the time of writing, the current VirtualBox version is 4.3.14. That said, the Network Simulator does make it a lot simpler when you want to spin up several instances, and interconnect them in interesting ways.

The new version runs much better with nested virtualisation, although it’s still not fantastic - I’d rather just spin up a VSR1000 system if I wanted to do something that didn’t need testing switching code.

This was in part due to my using nested virtualisation. When I tried it previously, it was unusably slow. This uses VirtualBox to provide a hypervisor, as opposed to QEMU in earlier versions. HP has released an updated Network Simulator.

Download virtualbox 4.2.18