Thursday, May 20, 2010

VirtualBox 3.2 released

Apart from the kind of obligatory yearly re-branding attempts[1] by the respective new owner, VirtualBox finally comes with some cool new features...

  • Latest Intel hardware support
  • Large Page support
  • In-hypervisor Networking
  • New Storage I/O subsystem
  • Remote Video Acceleration
  • Multiple Virtual Monitors
  • Hot-plug CPU's
  • Virtual SAS Controller
  • Online Snapshot Merging
Details and explanations here, download here.
and, as they guys from ElReg say in their article,

With VirtualBox 3.2 (and no one is ever going to call it Oracle VM VirtualBox, so let's get that straight), the software engineers have tweaked the type 2 (meaning hosted) hypervisor so it can run on all the latest "Westmere" variants of Intel's Core i5 and i7 processors for desktops and the Xeon 5600s for servers and high-end workstations.

VirtualBox 3.2 also sports acceleration for the Remote Data Protocol if you are using a Windows 7 client in a VM, and the hypervisor can emulate an LSI Logic SAS controller for storage as well, which is common in high-end x64 workstations and entry servers and midrange x64 servers.

VirtualBox supports just about any x64 operating system you can imagine: Windows NT all the way back to 4.0 and Windows all the way back to 3.0, plus DOS, OS/2, Linux 2.4 and 2.6, Solaris, and BSD Unix - and now Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 and Canonical Ubuntu 10.04 are added to the long list.

So, away with the just-installed v3.1.8 and lets got 3.2...
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[1] Sun Virtualbox, Sun xVM Virtualbox, Oracle VM VirtualBox, ... come to mind

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