VirtualBox 3.1.0
VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.
VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while innotek ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.
WHAT’S NEW
Version 3.1.0:
Added:
- Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another (see the manual for more information)
- VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well (“branched snapshots”; see the manual for more information)
- 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion (see the manual for more information)
- More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to arbitrary storage controllers, and there can be more than one such drive (the manual for more information)
- The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
- Complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher
- Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
- Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface; see the manual for more information)
- Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net; see the manual for more information)
Fixed and/or added:
- VMM: guest SMP fixes for certain rare cases
- GUI: snapshots include a screenshot
- GUI: locked storage media can be unmounted by force
- GUI: the a log window grabbed all key events from other GUI windows (bug #5291)
- GUI: allow to disable USB filters (bug #5426)
- GUI: improved memory slider in the VM settings
- GUI: the VirtualBox website couldn’t be opened from the help menu (bug #4559)
- 3D support: major performance improvement in VBO processing
- 3D support: added GL_EXT_framebuffer_object, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array support
- 3D support: fixed crashes in FarCry, SecondLife, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Eve Online (bugs #2801, #2791)
- 3D support: fixed graphics corruption in World of Warcraft (#2816)
- 3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (#4653)
- 3D support: fixed incorrect rendering of non ARGB textures under compiz
- iSCSI: support iSCSI targets with more than 2TiB capacity
- VRDP: fixed occasional VRDP server crash (bug #5424)
- Network: fixed the E1000 emulation for QNX (and probably other) guests (bug #3206)
- NAT: added host resolver DNS proxy (see the manual for more information)
- VMDK: fixed incorrectly rejected big images split into 2G pieces (bug #5523, #2787)
- VMDK: fixed compatibility issue with fixed or raw disk VMDK files (bug #2723)
- VHD: fixed incompatibility with Hyper-V
- Support for Parallels version 2 disk image (HDD) files; see the manual for more information
- OVF: create manifest files on export and verify the content of an optional manifest file on import
- OVF: fixed memory setting during import (bug #4188)
- Mouse device: now five buttons are passed to the guest (bug #3773)
- VBoxHeadless: fixed loss of saved state when VM fails to start
- VBoxSDL: fixed crash during shutdown (Windows hosts only)
- X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302)
- Mac OS X hosts: don’t auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (bug #4866)
- Mac OS X hosts (64 bit): don’t interpret mouse wheel events as left click (bug #5049)
- Mac OS X hosts: fixed a VM abort during shutdown under certain conditions
- Solaris hosts: combined the kernel interface package into the VirtualBox main package
- Solaris hosts: support for OpenSolaris Boomer architecture (with OSS audio backend).
- Shared folders: VBOXSVR is visible in Network folder (Windows guests, bug #4842)
- Shared folders: performance improvements (Windows guests, bug #1728)
- Windows, Linux and Solaris Additions: added balloon tip notifier if VirtualBox host version was updated and Additions are out of date
- Solaris guests: fixed keyboard emulation (bug #1589)
- Solaris Additions: fixed as_pagelock() failed errors affecting guest properties (bug #5337)
- Windows Additions: added automatic logon support for Windows Vista and Windows 7
- Windows Additions: improved file version lookup for guest OS information
- Windows Additions: fixed runtime OS detection on Windows 7 for session information
- Windows Additions: fixed crash in seamless mode (contributed by Huihong Luo)
- Linux Additions: added support for uninstalling the Linux Guest Additions (bug #4039)
- Linux guest shared folders: allow mounting a shared folder if a file of the same name as the folder exists in the current directory (bug #928)
- SDK: added object-oriented web service bindings for PHP5
REQUIREMENTS
Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
PRICE
Free