Submitted by Sun just released xVM VirtualBox 2.1.0, a major update with several new features, among them: better 64-bit support, hardware-assisted virtualization on MacOS, OpenGL 3D acceleration, easier networking on Windows and Linux, emulated SCSI controllers and full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots.
Being an old time Parallels user (and later also VMware), I’m impressed by the progress Virtual Box has been making. This release is way more stable and it feels faster than the previous one. There will be full reviews here and there, but if you use VBox, don’t hesitate upgrading.
It’s still *not* a replacement for VMware/Parallels for some “more serious” stuff, but for the occasional “i need this small windows app from time to time” user, this is close to perfection. More when you take the price into account: == 0;
I must say that the progress i very rapid indeed. It’s a must try!
… Having recently switched a large number of machines from VMWare Server (I greatly dislike the v2.x) to KVM and having evaluated VBOX 2.0 as an alternative I was disappointed by the lack of SMP guest support (Compared to KVM’s huge-SMP support) and the somewhat mediocre networking support (Especially compared to VMWare).
Hopefully Sun will address these issues in VBOX 3.
(Nothing beats allocating 6 NIC’s and 8 CPUs to VM on a 24 core server…)
– Gilboa
Drats! Looks like I still can’t install my son’s ChessMaster game. However, according to the manual, DirectX is coming.
Some parts of the networking has changed in 2.1 (e.g., you no longer need a tap device for host-only networking), and if you get a network-related error message when you start 2.1 then you can fix it by shutting down virtualbox and disabling all network adapters in the settings xml file of the virtual machine(s) in question. Then when you start virtualbox it’s now possible to re-enable the networking.
Already available in Mandriva Cooker and 2009.0 /backports .
Looks like a nice new release – the vastly improved handling of networking is particularly neat.
Looks like they’ve made a nasty bug there.