The stats are in... Sun's xVM VirtualBox has been downloaded more than 5
million times by developers, consumers and SMBs all over the world. And
it doesn't stop there – the new VirtualBox 1.6 has been downloaded
10,000 times a day since it went live earlier this month.
Why so much interest? Well, Sun's xVM VirtualBox is transforming the way
people develop software because there's no longer the need for
developers to be tied to big testing labs. With a laptop from anywhere
in the globe, developers can create multiple virtual machines, network
them together and deploy them using their favorite operating system. Sun's VP of xVM, Steve Wilson, has some interesting info here.
Top 10 reasons developers dig xVM VirtualBox:
1. It's Free! Cost $0. Nada. You can get it here.
2. FIRST hypervisor that supports ALL major operating systems, including
Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris and Windows as a host and Linux,
Solaris, OpenSolaris, Windows and OS/2 as a guest!
3. Ability to develop for any operating system in the data center right
from a laptop.
4. Guest addition feature allows for transparent, full screen mode, so
developers can flow around the Mac OS X, Windows, Linux or Solaris
operating systems on the same screen and forget about the one desktop
per environment experience.
5. Easy to use -- 20 MB file that takes 10 seconds to download with a
decent connection, five minutes to install and off developers go, putting
their favorite operating systems on it right away! No forced trade-offs
needed.
6. Bye-bye FTP! Hello Drag & Drop! -- Shared folders capabilities
between the virtual machines and the host OS allow developers to define
a set of folders on their host desktop. As a result, the guest OS can
read and write to that directory, making drag and drop really fast.
7. More control -- Developers do ALL the needed tuning according to the
way they want it and can give IT encapsulated VMs with the exact
environment they want, which gets carried all the way through. Think no
more version control nightmares and bug fixes.
8. This baby got speed -- Delivers high-performance virtual hardware for
its guests, enabling guest platforms to run at near-native speeds.
9. Advanced support for USB devices and built in RDP server, allowing
developers to connect to any guests' virtual graphics card over the
network.
10. xVM VirtualBox Hearts Developers.
Sun's xVM VirtualBox is currently licensed in an open source edition
under GPLv2 as well as in its binary form under a Personal Use License,
and you can download it for free at http://www.virtualbox.org or from Sun.com at http://www.sun.com/virtualbox.