Friday, March 12th, 2010

Right on time, the next major VirtualBox version is released – VirtualBox 3.0.0!
Major changes in VirtualBox 3.0
The two major improvements in VirtualBox 3.0 can be summed up like this:

multi-processor VMs – guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs (VT-x and AMD-V only)
graphics improvements: Direct3D 8/9 (Windows guests only) and OpenGL 2.0 (Windows, Linux and [...]

Another major release of Sun xVM VirtualBox, the 2.1.0 version, is now available for download.
From the list of major improvements, I'd like to highlight comment a few.

Finally, I have the time to confirm one of the releases I've been waiting for: VirtualBox, a desktop virtualization by Sun Microsystems, turned 2.0 last week and you can download VirtualBox 2.0 right now!

Sun Microsystems has just released the maintenance update to VirtualBox product, so xVM VirtualBox 1.6.2 is available for download.
Looks like version 1.6.2 is well worth the upgrade, at least for 64-bit PCs. I'm also happy to see many of Linux and Solaris host-related fixes, the stability of VirtualBox has really improved since version 1.5.

Last week, Sun Microsystems has released the next major update for its recently acquired VirtualBox product – Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.
What is Sun xVM VirtualBox?
VirtualBox is an absolutely free virtualization product for x86 platform. It supports both 32bit and 64bit architectures and can be used in both server and desktop virtualization.

Sun Microsystems has just announced the agreement to acquire innotek, a Germany-based provider of an open source desktop virtualization software called VirtualBox.

Finally, I've got a chance to try the in action. As an experiment, I've installed Windows XP inside a fully virtualized xVM domU on an OpenSolaris build 79 – please click the thumbnail to see a full screenshot.

Just a few weeks ago, Sun had introduced xVM – a family of virtualization solutions based on the technology of open source project called Xen.
Recent builds of OpenSolaris have full support for xVM, which means that you can activate it by booting Solaris in a special mode (it's a separate menu item in your Grub [...]