And many other interesting improvements

Dec 1, 2009 12:58 GMT  ·  By

Sun Microsystems proudly announced on the last day of November that its popular virtualization software, VirtualBox, reached version 3.1.0. This major update brings lots of new features, many bugfixes and improvements over previous 3.0.x versions. The big and breathtaking news is that users are now able to migrate live virtual machine sessions, from one system to another. This feature is called "Teleportation" or "Live Migration."

Highlights of VirtualBox 3.1.0:

· Ability to migrate live virtual machine sessions; · Ability to restore the state of a virtual machine from arbitrary snapshots; · Ability to take new snapshots from existing snapshots; · Added 2D video acceleration support for Windows guests; · Support for multiple virtual CD/DVD-ROM drives (attached to an existing IDE controller); · Ability to change the network attachment type from a running virtual machine; · Added support to uninstall the Linux Guest Additions image; · Added support to import Parallels v2 disk images; · Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris systems; · Greatly improved the performance of AMD64 and PAE guests; · Experimental EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) support; · Added support for paravirtualized network adapters; · Added screenshots for snapshots; · Fixed some rare SMP bugs, for guest machines; · USB filters can now be disabled; · Added support for the GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array and GL_EXT_framebuffer_object OpenGL extensions; · The FarCry, Call of Duty, SecondLife, Unreal Tournament and Eve Online games will no longer crash; · Fixed a display issue for World of Warcraft; · Fixed some Compiz animation issues; · iSCSI targets with a capacity over 2TiB are now supported; · Shared folders that contain files with the same name as the directory can now be mounted on Linux guests.

There are, of course, some other minor improvements or fixes, so if you're interested, check the official changelog. Please remember that you need to uninstall your existing 3.0.x VirtualBox package before installing the brand-new VirtualBox 3.1.0. The existing virtual machines will NOT be deleted!

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The new Storage configuration of VirtualBox 3.1.0 allows multiple CD-ROM devices

Sun xVM VirtualBox enables users to create "virtual machines" in their host operating system so that they can install any guest OS, facilitating the development, cross-platform running and testing of multi-tier applications on a single computer.

Download Sun xVM VirtualBox 3.1.0 right now from Softpedia.