17 December 2008, 13:08

VirtualBox 2.1 adds hardware virtualisation for Macs and more

A new release of Sun's VirtualBox desktop virtualisation application for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris is a major update. New in the VirtualBox 2.1 release is hardware virtualisation (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X host systems, which arrives alongside support for the Intel Nehalem virtualisation enhancements. Support for virtual machines generated by VMWare is improved and now includes full support for VMWare snapshots. A new NAT engine improves network performance, while new implementations of the Host Interface for networking on Windows and Linux hosts, should make it easier to configure.

Other updates are a number of what are listed as "experimental" features. These include 3D acceleration via OpenGL, LSILogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers, and support for 64-bit guest sessions on a 32-bit operating system. Over thirty other bug fixes are listed for the new release, all of which are detailed in the change log. VirtualBox is available commercially, free for personal use or as the Virtual Box Open Source Edition, under the GPL.

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