VirtualBox
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VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD. VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Sun ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.
Some of the features of VirtualBox are:
• Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don't have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox.
• Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.
• Guest Additions for Windows and Linux. VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window).
• Shared folders. Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as "shared folders", which can then be accessed from within virtual machines.
A number of extra features are available with the full VirtualBox release only (see the "Editions" page for details):
• Virtual USB Controllers. VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device specific drivers on the host.
• Remote Desktop Protocol. Unlike any other virtualization software, VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to "run" the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data.
• USB over RDP. With this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices that are connected on the RDP client. This way, a powerful server machine can virtualize a lot of thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in.
Changes in VirtualBox 3.2.0 (released 2010-05-18):
The following major new features were added:
* Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility
* Experimental support for Mac OS X guests (see the manual for more information)
* Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)
* Page Fusion automatically de-duplicates RAM when running similar VMs thereby increasing capacity. Currently supported for Windows guests on 64-bit hosts (see the manual for more information)
* CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)
* New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)
* Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
* Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI for Windows guests (see the manual for more information)
* USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available (see the manual for more information).
* LsiLogic SAS controller emulation (see the manual for more information)
* RDP video acceleration (see the manual for more information)
* NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
* Use of host I/O cache is now configurable (see the manual for more information)
* Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system (replaces the automatic system presimparation feature; see the manual for more information)
* OVF: enhanced OVF support with custom namespace to preserve settings that are not part of the base OVF standard
In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
* VMM: fixed Windows 2000 guest crash when configured with a large amount of RAM (bug #5800)
* Linux/Solaris guests: PAM module for automatic logons added
* GUI: guess the OS type from the OS name when creating a new VM
* GUI: added VM setting for passing the time in UTC instead of passing the local host time to the guest (bug #1310)
* GUI: fixed seamless mode on secondary monitors (bugs #1322 and #1669)
* GUI: offer to download the user manual in the OSE version (bug #6442)
* Main: allow to start a VM even if a virtual DVD or floppy medium is not accessible
* Settings: be more robust when saving the XML settings files
* Mac OS X: rewrite of the CoreAudio driver and added support for audio input (bug #5869)
* Mac OS X: external VRDP authentication module support (bug #3106)
* Mac OS X: Moved the realtime dock preview settings to the VM settings (no global option anymore). Use the dock menu to configure it.
* Mac OS X: added the VM menu to the dock menu
* 3D support: fixed corrupted surface rendering (bug #5695)
* 3D support: fixed VM crashes when using ARB_IMAGING (bug #6014)
* 3D support: fixed assertion when guest applications uses several windows with single OpenGL context (bug #4598)
* 3D support: added GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object support
* 3D support: added OpenGL 2.1 support
* 3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (Mac OS X only) (bug #4653)
* 3D support: fixed blank screen after loading snapshot of VM with enabled Compiz
* Added support for virtual high precision event timer (HPET)
* OVF: fixed mapping between two IDE channels in OVF and the one IDE controller in VirtualBox
* OVF: fix VMDK format string identifiers and sort XML elements from rasd: namespace alphabetically as prescribed by standard
* VBoxShell: interactive Python shell extended to be fully functional TUI for VirtualBox
* Linux Additions: support Fedora 13 (bug #6370)
* VBoxManage: fixed overly strict checks when creating a raw partition VMDK (bugs #688, #4438)
Download VirtualBox
Code:http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
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