Oracle Builds Upon VirtualBox With 3.2 Beta

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 28 April 2010 at 08:49 AM EDT. 8 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION
While Oracle has yet to put out OpenSolaris 2010.03 and they have disbanded other open-source projects formerly under Sun's umbrella, they are moving full-steam ahead with Virtualbox. This morning Oracle has put out the VirtualBox 3.2 Beta, which re-brands itself as Oracle VM VirtualBox.

Beyond changing around the branding to reflect Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the 3.2 Beta of VirtualBox offers experimental support for Mac OS X guests, memory ballooning support to dynamically change the amount of RAM exposed to guest VMs, CPU hot-plugging for Linux and some Windows guests, new hypervisor features, support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running, support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI, USB tablet/keyboard emulation, RDP video acceleration, NAT engine configuration, and support for executing guest applications from the host system.

This is quite a nice set of features, albeit some will be disappointed that there are no plans for a Gallium3D driver for VirtualBox. VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts should also provide faster performance via the new VirtualBox hypervisor features and there are various other features and bug-fixes in this release too.

The release notes with feature list for Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2 Beta 1 can be found on the VirtualBox mailing list.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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