Oracle last week announced the availability of a beta for version 5.0 of its type-2 virtualization platform VM Virtualbox. VM Virtualbox, which was originally developed by InnoTek became part of the SUN portfolio in 2008, when Sun acquired InnoTek and its assets. When Oracle acquired Sun in 2009, the VM Virtualbox became part of the Oracle portfolio. When that happened, a lot of people wondered if Oracle would continue development on the VM Virtualbox product, since Oracle is not a virtualization product vendor per se. Today we can conclude that development on the product is still very active.
Version 5 will bring the following new features (among others):
- Paravirtualization support for Windows and Linux guests to improve time-keeping accuracy and performance
- More instruction sets will become available to guests which run hardware assisted virtualization and nested paging.
- USB3 controller
- Bidirectional drag and drop support for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
- Customizing encryption options for disk images
- VM output scaling and HiDPI displays support
- Hotplugging of SATA disks support
- USB traffic capturing and USB hard disks
- VMs can be disconnected from a GUI session and run in background