virtualbox

Overview

VirtualBox is minikube’s original driver. It may not provide the fastest start-up time, but it is the most stable driver available for users of Microsoft Windows Home.

Requirements

• VirtualBox 5.2 or higher

Usage

Start a cluster using the virtualbox driver:

minikube start --driver=virtualbox

To make virtualbox the default driver:

minikube config set driver virtualbox

Special features

minikube start supports some VirtualBox specific flags:

• --host-only-cidr: The CIDR to be used for the minikube VM (default “192.168.59.1/24”)
  • On Linux, Mac OS X and Oracle Solaris with VirtualBox >= 6.1.28, only IP addresses in the 192.168.56.0/21 range are allowed for host-only networking by default. Passing a disallowed value to --host-only-cidr will result in a VirtualBox access denied error: VBoxManage: error: Code E_ACCESSDENIED (0x80070005) - Access denied (extended info not available).
• --no-vtx-check: Disable checking for the availability of hardware virtualization

Apple Silicon (darwin/arm64)

VirtualBox added Apple Silicon host support in VirtualBox 7.1. minikube’s virtualbox driver works on darwin/arm64 subject to these constraints:

• Minimum version: VirtualBox 7.1. 7.2 or later is recommended for stability. Older VirtualBox versions will be rejected with a clear error at minikube start time.
• No shared folders. The arm64 minikube ISO does not ship VirtualBox Guest Additions, so vboxsf mounts and minikube mount are not available. The driver automatically sets NoShare=true on darwin/arm64 so this limitation does not block cluster startup.
• VirtualBox on Apple Silicon is still maturing. Users may hit VirtualBox bugs unrelated to minikube. vfkit and qemu2 are also available on Apple Silicon and may be better suited if VirtualBox-specific features (e.g. a pre-existing VirtualBox workflow, GUI tooling) are not required.

Issues

• Full list of open ‘virtualbox’ driver issues

Troubleshooting

• Run minikube start --alsologtostderr -v=7 to debug crashes

• If you experience slow network performance with the VirtualBox driver, changing the Network Interface Card (NIC) type may improve speed. Use the following command to start minikube with the AMD PCNet FAST III (Am79C973) for both NAT and host-only network interfaces:

  minikube start --vm-driver=virtualbox --nat-nic-type=Am79C973 --host-only-nic-type=Am79C973