Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal - Charles Darwin
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Sun releases VirtualBox 2.1
SUN MICROSYSTEMS has announced a new release of its sort-of 'open source' desktop virtualisation product, xVM VirtualBox.
Sun's desktop VM turns any PC into a virtualisation platform that can run several different operating systems simultaneously on one hardware system. That can avoid the need to buy and support multiple hardware systems and speed development and testing work versus running multiple operating systems with a multi-boot environment. VirtualBox supports Solaris and OpenSolaris, of course, plus Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux systems.
In its review published in early November, Desktop Linux called Sun's VirtualBox "The best virtualization program you've never heard of." Sun claims that xVM VirtualBox has been downloaded eight million times, with 2.5 million registrations since October 2007. The company says that xVM VirtualBox is downloaded 25,000 times daily.
VirtualBox 2.1 adds Mac OS/X hardware virtualisation, support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts, 3D graphics acceleration, SCSI storage support and improved networking features, along with a couple of other new features that we couldn't decipher at first glance and a raft of fixes.
According to Sun's Changelog, xVM VirtualBox 2.1 is a major release. It's a point-release, though, possibly because several new features are still labeled as 'experimental' for now.
According to Sun, the major new features of this release include:
- Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
- Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental)
- Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements (EPT and VPID)
- 3D acceleration via OpenGL (experimental)
- LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers (experimental)
- Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots
- New NAT engine with significantly better performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support
- New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)
Most VirtualBox code has been licenced as Free Software under the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL) since 2007, and the open sauce VirtualBox project still maintains an Open Source Edition (OSE) of VirtualBox as a source-code distribution. The release of Sun's enterprise or 'xVM' version of VirtualBox was complemented with a snapshot of the OSE source files "made at the time of the stable 2.1.0 release."
The VirtualBox OSE is tweaked, built and distributed by a number of Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, Fedora, Mandriva, SuSE and others.
The OSE version of VirtualBox 2.1 will take some time for the Linux distributions to build and release, so individual users who don't want to wait can either try compiling the OSE version themselves or download binaries of Sun's xVM release, which is licenced under its "VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License." Or they can buy a licence from Sun for xVM VirtualBox for $30, which includes additional enterprise features that the company makes available only in its proprietary version.
Free downloads of the OSE version of VirtualBox 2.1 are available here. µ
L'Inq
Sun
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I started out with Boot Camp, then used Parallels, then moved to Fusion when the latter became too bloated. Moved to VirtualBox about 4 months ago and haven't looked back. It's faster than the others, the updates are nice 'n small instead of 200+ MB monoliths, and the price, well... it's free!
I like the idea of 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts, so that I could prep 64-bit kernels on my MBP, for testing if nothing else.
We've been using it for testing software deployments with .Net stuff. It's fast with AMD-V/VT-x options enabled, and the OpenGL acceleration will make our WPF eyecandy fly :D
I've been running Ubuntu, OpenSolaris and Windows XP Pro in the last edition of VirtualBox on a Vista Ultimate system. I just installed OpenSolaris on this new VirtualBox 2.1 and there seems to be a lot of improved performance. Too early to really know but so far I'm happy.
So is the OSE edition available for OSX as well as the 'free for personal use' version?
I must admit, I do like VirtualBox. I used to run it on my old work laptop (running Windows) but I couldn't seem to get it working on Ubuntu, the networking side just 'didn't work'. Looks like it's time to have another go :-)
Quite interesting that it supports AMD-V on OSX, I presume that is for Mac developers and Macintosh users?
Rob
We've used vbox for about 6 months now. It's running on our Ubuntu based CS systems so that a single legacy Windows app can run. (No wine isn't an option yet.)
Networking has been the most difficult part of it resulting in very long access times in it's default mode, or complicated and seemingly fragile custom set ups.
It sounds like they've at last addressed it's number one problem.