You got VirtualBox and have been playing with it but there are a couple of things missing that you wish you could do.  Here's a couple of VirtualBox tips that will save you hours of pain  and research time.

A while back I read an interesting article on CodeProject about building a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box using a computer that would otherwise be used as a door stop or for spare parts. Being the cheap SOB that I am this sounded like a perfect project for me, but at the time I didn't have a spare computer laying around. After waiting for some time and not being able to find a free box I found that I cound buy a few parts new and use some of the spare parts that I did have laying around. To make a long story short I found a deal on NewEgg and ended up with the following;

            System Specs.           
                Biostar G31E-M7 Mobo 
                Intel Celeron 1.8 Gb Processor 
                1 GB DDR2 Ram 
                550W Power supply
                Had an old case and CD reader            
            Total cost including shipping < $200
        

I installed FreeNAS and had it set up in a short time and was very pleased with the results but as is always the case I got a bad case of scope creep. Since I use Subversion as my source control of choice I wanted to set up a repository but found it to be a daunting task, and since I didn't have an intemit knowledge of FreeBSD I went looking for alternatives to FreeNAS. My son has used Ubuntu on occasion and recommended it but not having any Linux experience I shyed away from it. But after some prodding I decided to give it a go so I installed it on VirtualBox and set it up as a server to see how easy it would be and if it would do what I wanted it to do and was astounded at the results. In this article I will relate my experiences with both products and give some insight into the capabiities, problems and comparisons between the two.

Recently I needed a Virtual sandbox to do some development work in and ended up looking at three Virtual Machine applications.  My requirements where simple an XP Pro host on an x86 machine with XP Home edition as the guest OS.  I needed very basic Internet access, file sharing and able to run the Visual Studio C++ 6.0 IDE and play nicely together.  I found out that there's a leading contender out there looking to beat VMWare at its own game and, its Open Source.