14 DAY TRIAL // To everyone's surprise, Oracle announced today the final release of the VirtualBox 5.2 open-source and cross-platform virtualization software for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows, and Solaris.
VirtualBox 5.2 is a massive update bringing a revamped and more modern graphical user interface (GUI) based on recent Qt5 technologies, as well as powerful new features that will help you with all of your virtualization tasks. One of these new features is the ability to finally export and store virtual machines into the cloud.
Oracle has made it possible to export VMs to its Oracle Cloud (OPC) public cloud service, allowing users to easily deploy virtual machines across multiple VirtualBox installations. Imagine you no longer have to export a VM to an external drive to import it on another computer, just download it from the Oracle Cloud.
Another interesting feature implemented in VirtualBox 5.2 is support for unattended guest installations, which is similar to the "Easy Install" feature found on the commercial VMWare Workstation 6.5 and 7 virtualization software. Also, there's now experimental audio support for the built-in video recording functionality.
VirtualBox's GUI received numerous improvements
Once you upgrade to VirtualBox 5.2 from the 5.1 series, which was recently updated to VirtualBox 5.1.30 with a bunch of fixes, you'll notice that the GUI has been greatly improved, starting with the overhaul of the VM selector and global tools handling, and continuing with new icons and better accessibility support.
Lots of other parts of the popular virtualization software received improvements, including audio, storage, BIOS, NAT networking, PXE, EFI, serial, as well as both Linux and Windows Additions. You can study the full changelog below if you're curious to know what exactly was improved, changed, removed, or fixed in this major release.
You can download VirtualBox 5.2 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from our web portal, and you should also visit the official website of the project if you want to download VirtualBox 5.2 for Solaris systems or get the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack.