VirtualBox 2.1 and the Engineering Team that Could

Man alive, those rascals on the VirtualBox engineering team make life difficult on a comms professional--what with a release schedule that reads like a seismic chart. To wit: xVM VirtualBox 2.1, the latest and greatest release of the most popular open source desktop and developer virtualization product.
Sure there are a host of new features (see below) but I thought I'd take a moment to focus on the rather astounding success of the open source project before enumerating the reasons you should pony up for a support subscription (btw, enterprise support is now available for as little as US$30 per year). Take a gander at these numbers and keep in mind that Sun acquired the small but mighty VirtualBox team less that a year ago:

  • 8 million-plus downloads
  • 25,000-plus downloads per day
  • 2.5 million registrations

So what's new in the latest version. Well, try these on for size:
  • New Accelerated 3D Graphics: Uses the industry standard application programming interface (API) for high-performance graphics, Open Graphics Library (OpenGL).
  • Improved Network Performance: Makes network intensive applications like rich media (video, audio, interactive media, etc.) even faster.
  • Storage Support: Comes with built-in iSCSI support to connect to storage systems, such as Sun's newly announced Open Storage appliances, the Sun Storage 7000 family, also known as "Amber Road."
  • Mac OS X on Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x): Provides better support for Mac OS X as a host OS utilizing hardware-assisted Intel VT-x for better performance.
  • VMware's and Microsoft's Virtualization Formats: Offers improved support for VMware's virtual machine disk format (VMDK) and Microsoft's virtual hard disk (VHD) file format.
  • Intel Core i7 processor: Enables extremely fast performance on leading-edge hardware with support for the new Intel Core microarchitecture in the Intel Core i7 processor (codenamed Nehalem).
  • 64-bit guest OS on 32-bit host platforms: Allows users to run powerful 64-bit guest OS on 32-bit host platforms without the need to upgrade the host OS while taking advantage of multi-thread applications on powerful hardware.

So, don't delay, for around 20 Megabytes of disk space you too can enjoy all of the great features of VirtualBox. Download it today for free.

Posted on: Dec 18, 2008

Posted by: Jesse Freund

Category: Personal

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Comments:

8 million-plus downloads
25,000-plus downloads per day
2.5 million registrations

None of which is gonna make poor Sun any money at all.

Posted by Sigmund Freund on December 19, 2008 at 05:45 AM PST #

I have to concur. It's a great upgrade. But how about nagging the xVM Server gang? Version 1.0 has been "coming soon" for months! :)

Posted by Charles Soto on December 21, 2008 at 08:38 PM PST #

And Sigmund, we use VMware VI3 extensively, and it all started with VMware Workstation.

Posted by Charles Soto on December 21, 2008 at 08:39 PM PST #

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