How to install Oracle Virtual Box on Linux (CentOS / RHEL 7)

In my last article I wrote an article with steps to install ClamAV (antivirus tool for Linux). Now in this article I will share the steps to install Oracle Virtual Box on CentOS / RHEL 7 Linux . Oracle VirtualBox is a virtualization application that has the capacity to run on multiple computer architectures (Intel, AMD-based systems) and on almost every available OS (OSX, Linux, Windows, Solaris, and so on), where it allows its users to run multiple operating systems on the same physical machine. Basically, virtual box is a full virtualization technology.

Most people count on it while using multiple systems and need to export and import template virtual machines, where virtual box offers a variety of options to exchange virtual machines between all kinds of infrastructures.

Steps to install Oracle Virtual Box

This section will show you how to install Oracle VirtualBox 5.2 on CentOS 7. Firstly, we need to add the VirtualBox yum repository to our system. So, we need to create its repo file in the YUM repository directory:

# cat /etc/yum.repos.d/virtualbox.repo
[virtualbox]
name=Oracle Linux / RHEL / CentOS-$releasever / $basearch - VirtualBox
baseurl=http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/el/$releasever/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc

We should also have the EPEL repository installed:

# rpm -ivh http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/Linux/Fedora/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/e/epel-release-7-11.noarch.rpm

Before we start the installation, we need to install some necessary packages to make sure that VirtualBox works fine:

# yum install gcc make kernel-headers kernel-devel fontforge binutils patch dkms glibc-headers glibc-devel qt libgomp

Then, we set up an environment variable called KERN_DIR, from which VirtualBox will get the kernel source code:

# export KERN_DIR=/usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`

You can get the list of available VirtualBox rpms in the repo using the below command

# yum list all | grep -i virtual
VirtualBox-4.3.x86_64 4.3.40_110317_el7-1 virtualbox
VirtualBox-5.0.x86_64 5.0.40_115130_el7-1 virtualbox
VirtualBox-5.1.x86_64 5.1.38_122592_el7-1 virtualbox
VirtualBox-5.2.x86_64 5.2.20_125813_el7-1 virtualbox
VirtualGL.x86_64 2.5.2-1.el7 epel
VirtualGL-devel.x86_64 2.5.2-1.el7 epel

Then, we can start the installation of VirtualBox using YUM:

# yum install VirtualBox-5.2

After the installation, we need to rebuild the kernel modules using the following command:

# systemctl start vboxdrv

Now, we have VirtualBox installed and ready for use. Still, VirtualBox only supports graphical interfaces, so we need to have one installed and then we can start it and use it.

Using GNOME as the graphical interface, we can start VirtualBox:

Lastly I hope the steps from the article to install Oracle Virtual Box on Linux was helpful. So, let me know your suggestions and feedback using the comment section.