VirtualBox 3.2 is released! A Red Letter Day?
- by Fat Bloke
Big news today! A new release of VirtualBox packed full of innovation and improvements. Over the next few weeks we'll take a closer look at some of these new features in a lot more depth, but today we'll whet your appetite with the headline descriptions.
To start with, we should point out that this is the first Oracle-branded version which makes today a real Red-letter day ;-)
Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2
Version 3.2 moves VirtualBox forward in 3 main areas ( handily, all beginning with "P" ) : performance, power and supported guest operating system platforms. Let's take a look:
Performance
New
Latest Intel hardware support - Harnessing the latest in
chip-level support for virtualization, VirtualBox 3.2 supports new
Intel Core i5 and i7 processor and Intel Xeon processor 5600 Series
support for Unrestricted Guest Execution bringing faster boot times
for everything from Windows to Solaris guests;
New
Large Page support -
Reducing the size and overhead of
key system resources, Large Page support delivers increased
performance by enabling faster lookups and shorter table creation
times.
New
In-hypervisor Networking - Significant optimization of the
networking subsystem has reduced context switching between guests
and host, increasing network throughput by up to 25%.
New
New Storage I/O subsystem - VirtualBox 3.2 offers a
completely re-worked virtual disk subsystem which utilizes
asynchronous I/O to achieve high-performance whilst maintaining high
data integrity;
New
Remote Video Acceleration - The unique built-in VirtualBox
Remote Display Protocol (VRDP), which is primarily used in virtual
desktop infrastructure deployments, has been enhanced to deliver
video acceleration. This delivers a rich user experience coupled
with reduced computational expense, which is vital when servers are
running hundreds of virtual machines;
Power
New
Page Fusion - Traditional Page Sharing techniques have
suffered from long and expensive cache construction as pages are
scrutinized as candidates for de-duplication. Taking a smarter
approach, VirtualBox Page Fusion uses intelligence in the guest
virtual machine to determine much more rapidly and accurately those
pages which can be eliminated thereby increasing the capacity or vm
density of the system;
New
Memory Ballooning- Ballooning provides another method to
increase vm density by allowing the memory of one guest to be
recouped and made available to others;
New
Multiple Virtual Monitors - VirtualBox 3.2 now supports
multi-headed virtual machines with up to 8 virtual monitors attached
to a guest. Each virtual monitor can be a host window, or be mapped
to the hosts physical monitors;
New
Hot-plug CPU's - Modern operating systems such Windows Server
2008 x64 Data Center Edition or the latest Linux server platforms
allow CPUs to be dynamically inserted into a system to provide
incremental computing power while the system is running. Version 3.2
introduces support for Hot-plug vCPUs, allowing VirtualBox virtual
machines to be given more power, with zero-downtime of the guest;
New
Virtual SAS Controller - VirtualBox 3.2 now offers a virtual
SAS controller, enabling it to run the most demanding of high-end
guests;
New
Online Snapshot Merging - Snapshots are powerful but can eat
up disk space and need to be pruned from time to time. Historically,
machines have needed to be turned off to delete or merge snapshots
but with VirtualBox 3.2 this operation can be done whilst the
machines are running. This allows sophisticated system management
with minimal interruption of operations;
New
OVF Enhancements - VirtualBox has supported the OVF standard
for virtual machine portability for some time. Now with 3.2,
VirtualBox specific configuration data is also stored in the
standard allowing richer virtual machine definitions without
compromising portability;
New
Guest Automation - The Guest Automation APIs allow host-based
logic to drive operations in the guest;
Platforms
New
USB Keyboard and Mouse - Support more guests that require USB
input devices;
New
Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 - Support for the latest version
of Oracle's flagship Linux platform;
New
Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx") - Support for both the
desktop and server version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution;
And as a man once said, "just one more thing" ...
New
Mac OS X (experimental) - On
Apple hardware only, support for creating virtual machines run Mac
OS X.
All in all this is a pretty powerful release packed full of innovation and speedups.
So what are you waiting for?
-FB
