14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Sun Microsystems announced a new beta release of its open source virtualization program, VirtualBox. Bringing Teleportation, a feature that allows for the live migration of a VM session from one machine to another, VirtualBox 3.1.0 can also restore VM states from arbitrary snapshots instead of just the last one. New snapshots can also be taken from other snapshots.
As usual, a lengthy list of changes is offered up with the release. Sun notes these key additions and tweaks:
- Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another; - 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"); - 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion; - More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to arbitrary storage controllers, and there can be more than one such drive; - 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); - Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface); - Support for para-virtualized network adapters.
For many of the changes included with VirtualBox 3.1.0, Sun advises users to check with the app’s help menu / user guide. In the latest beta release, the makers of the Java platform also added support for Parallels version 2 disk image (HDD) files. This feature should also make its way into a stable version soon enough. Download links are available below for getting the latest version of Sun Microsystem’s VirtualBox, or the VirtualBox Software Development Kit.