Complete the Windows Server 2012 installation and get ready to configure the environment for SharePoint 2016 installation. Once VM is restarted, Windows Server 2012 installation will begin.Once ISO file is mounted, restart the VM. For that click on Devices > Optical Drives and Choose Disk Image. You need to mount Windows Server 2012 ISO image file to your VM.Once started, it will show a 'No bootable disk error' message. Once your VM is created, it will be available in left Pan.

From the next screen, select 'Create a virtual hard disk now' and select 'Çreate'.

From the next screen, allocate at least 10240MB (10GB) of memory to your VM.

Give your VM a name and select Version as Windows Server 2012 and click Next.

Open VirtualBox and click on 'New' from top ribbon.

To download SharePoint 2016 Beta 2 trial version, click here.įollow the below steps to create a new VirtualBox Server VM, boot the VM from Windows Server 2012 ISO file and install the Windows server.

Download SQL Server 2014 SP1 180 days trial version here.

Download Windows Server 2012 R2 180 days trial version here.

You can download 180 Days trial version of Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014 from TechNet Evaluation Center. You need to download Windows Server 2012 R2, SQL Server 2014 SP1 and SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2 ISO files. Once VirtualBox Manager (or HyperV, Virtual PC or WMware Workstation) is downloaded and installed. I am using 'New Dell XPS 15' with Quad Core 6th Gen Core i7 Processor, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD Drive and touch screen display.

To setup this virtual environment, you need to have at least 16GB of RAM and Core i7 processor on your host machine. Find more details about Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager image format support, click here. I decided to go for Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager simply because it's lightweight and supports all different image formats (VHD/VHDX, VDI, VMDK, etc.). In this blog, I will talk about how I created the VirtualBox VM environment and how to install the Windows Server 2012 R2 on VirtualBox VM.

I decided to create the VM to explore SharePoint 2016 new features, especially SharePoint 2016 Hybrid Cloud based infrastructure, improved user experience and compliance and reporting. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2 version was released in Nov 2015.

How to use virtualbox 2016