Virtual Appliance under VirtualBox

[VirtualBox] is an alternate virtual machine to the VMware player. It is free, open source software like OpenEMR. It can use the same virtual machine files as VMWare player. This page documents how I set up VirtualBox to run.

In order to run the OpenEMR virtual appliance under [VirtualBox] you need to perform a few additional steps.

the process in overview is:

• download and install VirtualBox
• download and unpack the appliance
• use a 'wizard' to make a machine description file to tell virtual box where the virtual machine files are and change some settings
• run the virtual machine

Specific instructions:

1. install virtualbox from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
2. download the virtual appliance .zip file as shown on OpenEMR_4.0.0_Virtual_Appliance
3. unpack the virtual appliance .zip file into a directory.
   1. Make a note of the directory path for later use.
4. Set up the machine description file
   1. start virtualbox, it should start at the virtual machine manager window
   2. create the file
      1. in the virtualbox manager window, select 'New' (looks like a blue sun)
      2. click Next to get past the 'Welcome to the New Virtual machine wizard' intro window
      3. enter a name for the VM in the name box. This is how the machine will be listed in the virtual machine manager list of VMs
      4. change the Operating System to 'Linux' with the dropdown box, Version defaults to Ubuntu, leave that as is.
      5. click 'Next'
      6. click 'Next' again to use the default ram size for the VM of 512MB
      7. click the 'Use existing hard disk' radio button
      8. click the folder icon to the right of the dropdown box to open up a file navigation window
      9. navigate to the directory where the openemr appliance files were unpacked earlier
      10. select the 'base' vmdk file - for the openemr-4-0-0-appliance-1 version I used for this, that file is called 'OpenEMR-3-0-1-appliance-1-cl3.vmdk'. (no -sxxx on the end)
      11. click 'Open' in the 'choose a virtual hard disk file' selection window
      12. click 'Next' to get to the summary window
      13. check over the settings, then click 'Finish'.
   3. adjust the setting of the file
      1. make sure the machine description you just made is highlighted in the manager window, then click settings (gold gear icon)
      2. click on 'system' in the left window pane
      3. you should be on the 'motherboard' tab, click on 'extended features: enable IO APIC checkbox'
      4. select the 'processor' tab, click on Enable PAE/NX
      5. click on 'storage' in the left window pane
      6. under 'IDE contoller' in the storage tree there should be an image of a CDROM labelled 'Empty'. Click to select it
      7. in the other half of the window under 'Attributes' there is a small disc icon next the CD/DVD Drive field. Click on it
      8. select the name of the DVD drive under the host OS, for me it was 'host drive E:'
      9. under attributes, there should now be a checkbox called 'passthrough', click to select it
      10. click on the 'network' in the left window pane
      11. in the 'adapter 1' tab, where it says Attached to: change it to 'Bridged Adapter' using the dropdown menu
      12. change the name to the name of the network adapter to be used. On my laptop it shows two entries, one for wifi and one for ethernet. I used the wifi
      13. click on 'OK' at the bottom of the window to save the settings.
   4. click 'start' to run the virtual machine
5. done! continue configuring OpenEMR as shown in the virtaul appliance user's manual