"experimental."

(Click for larger view of Sun's vVM VirtualBox 2.1, running on a Macintosh OS X host)

Though boasting a seemingly minor release number (2.1), the new VirtualBox represents a major release, according to the changelog. However, many of the most significant new features are still described as "experimental." The changelog calls out new features that include:

• Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
  
  
• Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental)
  
  
• Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements (EPT and VPID)
  
  
• 3D acceleration via OpenGL (experimental)
  
  
• LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers (experimental)
  
  
• "Full" VMDK/VHD support including snapshots
  
  
• New NAT engine with "significantly better" performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support
  
  
• New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)

VirtualBox backgrounder

VirtualBox is a graphical tool for managing virtual machines on the desktop. It lets users create and manage one or more "virtual machines," on which various x86 operating systems can be installed and run.

As in the past, VirtualBox 2.1 targets both users and developers. It lets users run favorite software, Sun says, while enabling developers convenience when building, testing, and running "cross-platform, multi-tier applications." It does this by enabling development and target systems to share a single physical host.

While it is free, VirtualBox must complete with Microsoft's own virtualization software offerings, such as Virtual Server 2005, Hyper-V, and Virtual PC. These products are also available at little or no cost, at least to anyone already running Windows as a host operating system.

However, VirtualBox supports Linux, OpenSolaris, Solaris, and Macintosh OS X, in addition to Windows. Therefore, the product permits running Windows virtually on, for example, an Apple MacBook, as pictured in the screenshot below.


Virtual Box 2.1, seen running Windows XP on a Macintosh OS X host operating system
(Click to enlarge)
A recent review by our sister publication DesktopLinux called VirtualBox "the best virtualization program you've never heard of," noting that "it manages the trifecta of being good, free and, sort of, open source." For further details of a pending open source version, see below.

Either way, Virtual Box 2.1's claimed support for the established Vmware VMDK and Microsoft VHD virtual machine file formats could be significant for embedded developers. Earlier this year, a posting on Microsoft's Windows Embedded blog described use of a tool known as VHDMount, supplied with Virtual Server 2005, to copy Windows XP Embedded (XPe) images into VHD files. The trick, potentially useful with Virtual Box as well, allows debugging, testing, and demonstration of multiple embedded operating system images on a single desktop system, according to Microsoft.

Open source virtualization

Much of VirtualBox was released under the GPL in 2007, according to the project's open source homepage. And, project developers continue to offer VirtualBox OSE (open source edition) as a source-code distribution. This code is subsequently built and distributed by many downstream distributors, such as Debian, Fedora, and others. Today's release of the new "enterprise" or "xVM" version of VirtualBox was accompanied by a "snapshot" of OSE sources "made at the time of the stable 2.1.0 release," though the code will likely take some time to get included in standard open source Linux distributions.

Users not wishing to wait for the OSE version of VirtualBox can immediately download binaries of the xVM version, under the terms of the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). Or, naturally, they can buy a license from Sun for the "enterprise" version, reportedly gaining in the process the added features listed here (or on Sun's site, here).

Jim McHugh, VP of datacenter marketing at Sun, stated, "With xVM VirtualBox software, developers all around the globe are turning their desktops and laptop computers into testing labs, creating multiple virtual machines, networking them together, and deploying them using any OS."

McHugh adds, "[Other users have] taken xVM VirtualBox software into IT departments, where we've seen desktop virtualization software being used to solve issues of PC management, software distribution, and desktop security."

Sun claims that xVM VirtualBox has been downloaded over 8 million times, worldwide, with 2.5 million registrations since October 2007, and 25,000 downloads a day, currently.

Further information

For more information on using virtualization to test Windows Embedded Standard or XPe operating system images, see postings on Microsoft's Windows Embedded blog, here and here.

The 30MB download of VirtualBox 2.1 can be found here. Sun's enterprise versions start at $30 per user per year, including "premium" (any time) support. More details may be found here.

To read DesktopLinux's review of VirtualBox, version 1.5, see here.

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