VirtualBox 3.1.0 arrives, adds teleportation support

Less than three weeks after the beta, Sun Microsystems has announced the release of version 3.1.0 of its open source VirtualBox desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. VirtualBox 3.1.0 is a major update that, in addition to the usual bug fixes and changes, adds a number of new features.

The latest release of VirtualBox features support for teleportation (aka live migration), allowing virtual machines to be moved, while running, from one machine to another. Virtual machine states can now be preserved in any snapshot, support has been added for branched snapshots and Windows guests now include support for 2D video acceleration using the host video hardware for overlay stretching and colour conversion.

Additional improvements include more flexible storage attachments, the ability to change the network attachment type while a VM is running and a complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts. The developers also note that they have achieved "significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests" and added experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) and paravirtualised network adapters.

More details about the release can be found in the Change Log. VirtualBox 3.1.0 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris. VirtualBox is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) and VirtualBox binaries are released under the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL) licence.

(crve)