In the Settings window, under "General", you can configure the most fundamental aspects of the virtual machine such as memory and essential hardware. There are three tabs, "Basic", "Advanced" and "Description".
Under the "Basic" tab of the "General" settings category, you can find these settings:
- Name
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The name under which the VM is shown in the list of VMs in the main window. Under this name, VirtualBox also saves the VM's configuration files. By changing the name, VirtualBox renames these files as well. As a result, you can only use characters which are allowed in your host operating system's file names.
Note that internally, VirtualBox uses unique identifiers (UUIDs) to identify virtual machines. You can display these with
VBoxManage. - Operating system / version
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The type of the guest operating system that is (or will be) installed in the VM. This is the same setting that was specified in the "New Virtual Machine" wizard, as described in Section 1.7, “Creating your first virtual machine”.
Whereas the default settings of a newly created VM depend on the selected operating system type, changing the type later has no effect on VM settings; this value is then purely informational and decorative.
- Snapshot Folder
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By default, VirtualBox saves snapshot data together with your other VirtualBox configuration data; see Section 10.1, “Where VirtualBox stores its files”. With this setting, you can specify any other folder for each VM.
- Shared Clipboard
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You can select here whether the clipboard of the guest operating system should be shared with that of your host. If you select "Bidirectional", then VirtualBox will always make sure that both clipboards contain the same data. If you select "Host to guest" or "Guest to host", then VirtualBox will only ever copy clipboard data in one direction.
Clipboard sharing requires that the VirtualBox Guest Additions be installed. As a result, this setting has no effect otherwise; see Chapter 4, Guest Additions for details.
The shared clipboard is disabled by default. See Section 13.3.2.3, “Clipboard” for an explanation. This setting can be changed at any time using the "Shared Clipboard" menu item in the "Devices" menu of the virtual machine.
- Drag and Drop
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This setting allows to enable support for drag and drop: Select an object (e.g. a file) from the host or guest and directly copy or open it on the guest or host. Multiple per-VM drag and drop modes allow restricting access in either direction.
For drag and drop to work the Guest Additions need to be installed on the guest.
Note
Drag and drop is disabled by default. This setting can be changed at any time using the "Drag and Drop" menu item in the "Devices" menu of the virtual machine.
See Section 4.4, “Drag and Drop” for more information. [11]
Here you can enter any description for your virtual machine, if you want. This has no effect on the functionality of the machine, but you may find this space useful to note down things like the configuration of a virtual machine and the software that has been installed into it.
To insert a line break into the description text field, press Shift+Enter.
[11] Experimental support for drag and drop was added with VirtualBox 4.2.