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08 April 2009, 15:07

Sun releases VirtualBox 2.2

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Sun Microsystems has announced the release of VirtualBox 2.2, a major update to it's open source desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. The release comes less than one month after the first beta was made available and includes several new features.

VirtualBox 2.2 supports the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF), a standard backed by the Distributed Management Task Force, for virtual machines and appliances that run inside of them. The OVF files can now be imported and exported allowing them to be sent to, or received from, other desktop virtualisation applications. OpenGL 3D graphics acceleration has been added for Solaris and Linux guests and works by intercepting OpenGL calls and passing them directly to the host OS and it's OpenGL library to run as native code.

Other additions include optimisations to the hypervisor providing performance gains for high context switching rates, a C API (in addition to C++, Java and Python) and a host-only networking mode. Solaris and OpenSolaris guests now support shared folders and experimental USB support has been added for OpenSolaris. The memory limit has been raised for virtual machines on 64-bit hosts, up from 3.5GB in the 2.1 release, to 16GB. VirtualBox 2.2 adds support for Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) hosts and includes over 30 bug fixes.

More details about the release can be found in the change log. Version 2.2 of VirtualBox is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris. A 243 page user manualPDF is also available. VirtualBox is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

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(crve)

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