The latest release of Sun's high performance, free and open source virtualization software, VirtualBox 2.2, is now available for download. It introduces support for the new Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard that enables virtual machines or appliances to be imported and exported. With VirtualBox 2.2, users can build virtual machines or appliances and effortlessly export them from a development environment and import them into a production environment. Support for OVF also helps to ensure VirtualBox 2.2 software is interoperable with other technologies that follow the standard.

"Now, with the new import and export features of the VirtualBox 2.2 release, users can quickly and easily put their development environments into production - on the desktop, the server or even in the cloud," said Jim McHugh, vice president Datacenter Software marketing at Sun.

VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also open source. VirtualBox software has been rapidly growing in popularity, surpassing 11 million downloads worldwide, 3.5 million registrations since October 2007, with in excess of 25,000 downloads a day. VirtualBox software is a 50 megabyte download and installs in less than five minutes.

"We continue to see great momentum for VirtualBox, through huge adoption numbers, as well as the speed and frequency of technology releases," McHugh said. "VirtualBox has always been a fantastic tool for developers to create multiple virtual machines, network them together and deploy them using nearly any operating system."

Version 2.2 of VirtualBox adds significant performance enhancements and other updates.

New Features:

• OVF appliance import and export
• Host-only networking mode
• Hypervisor optimizations with significant performance gains for high context switching rates
• Raised the memory limit for VMs on 64-bit hosts to 16GB
• VT-x/AMD-V are enabled by default for newly created virtual machines
• USB (OHCI & EHCI) is enabled by default for newly created virtual machines (Qt GUI only)
• Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts
• Shared folders for Solaris and OpenSolaris guests
• OpenGL 3D acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests
• Added C API in addition to C++, Java, Python and Web Services

It is important to remember to reinstall the guest additions for all existing VMs with this download, notes Bob Netherton in his blog.

Organizations should note that Sun does offer enterprise subscriptions for wider deployments. These start at $30 (USD) per user per year, which includes 24/7 premium support from Sun's technical team. Discounts are available based on volume.

Partners interested in redistributing the VirtualBox technology as part of their own solution should know that Sun does offers a comprehensive OEM licensing program.

More Information

Download

VirtualBox Changelog for the complete list of changes

Sun Virtualization Solutions [...read more...]

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