How do you create your first virtual machine in VirtualBox? I’ve downloaded Here, I am using version 7. This version runs on Windows 11.

When you first install VirtualBox, you get the following interface.

Click the blue New icon.

The default hardware setting is 2048MB, but because I have a lot of RAM installed on this host machine, I have increased the Base Memory to 8192MB.

After you create a virtual machine, you need to download and install Linux (or some other operating system) on your virtual machine. You can download the ISO Rocky Linus 9 file from

Rocky Linux 9.3 minimal download is about 1.6GB and will take several minutes, enough for a coffee. It is February 2, 2024 and the file that I am downloading, because I’m on Windows, is called Rocky-9.3-x86_64-minimal.iso. You will need to install it. There a few steps to do that. You will need to think of a password as well.

Attach the ISO

You need to attach the ISO you downloaded so that we can install the operating system on the virtual machine (VM).