How to Install Oracle Virtual Box on Ubuntu 16.04 on a DigitalOcean Droplet

I wanted to circumvent my residential FIOS with my one dynamic public ip in my home lab without upgrading to a commercial account with Verizon. Right now I’m enjoying 1Gig up and down. One look at commercial prices and its a small fortune for static ip’s and the same residential speed..

I had the idea of tunneling public ip’s from a public cloud to my home lab. Once i get this working I will post the steps to re create this scenario.

However in my testing I want to run a hypervisor and openvswitch on Digital Ocean to test a software vtep with openvswitch as its base. These are the steps to install a headless Virtual Box. I created two of them. One instance of Virtual Box is running nested on ESXi 6.7 in a Ubuntu 16.04 server vm and the other on Digital Ocean.

These are the steps to install VirtualBox on a Digital Ocean Ubuntu server 16.04 Droplet.

Log into your instance using a ssh client.

type as root or use sudo:

sudo apt-get -y install gcc make linux-headers-$(uname -r) dkms

Next, these commands will add the Vbox repository and key:

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add - 

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

sh -c 'echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -sc) contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'

Next update and install

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-5.2

Oracle Virtualbox is now installed!

However lets also install the extension pack.

curl -O http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.2.4/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.2.4-119785.vbox-extpack

sudo VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.2.4-119785.vbox-extpack

Tada! you can test the install with VboxManage -v