Installing VirtualBox on Centos 7

Last post I described how to install VirtualBox Guest Additions on Centos 7.  Since we are now running Centos 7 as the host operating system on several machines in our IT lab, we will also need to install VirtualBox itself on these machines, so that we can run VMs for testing that are hosted on the Centos boxes.

Here is how to do that (Note: be sure you are running the latest kernel before you start, and thanks to this post):

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
# wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/rhel/virtualbox.repo
# yum install epel-release
# yum install dkms
# yum install VirtualBox-5.0

VirtualBox will now appear in the Applications -> System Tools menu.

Before individual users can create VMs, they have to be added to the vboxusers group with:

# usermod -a -G vboxusers [user name]

 Users added to the group can now start VirtualBox and install VMs.