Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2 narrows gap with VMware, Parallels

Oracle is in a constant battle over market share and visibility for its virtualization products against the likes of VMware, the 800-pound gorilla. Despite the competition, Oracle’s VM VirtualBox hypervisor is chugging along after being assimilated into the Oracle collective more than two years ago.

Many people feared that Oracle would kill off VirtualBox after it acquired Sun Microsystems, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it’s been a little over a year since the last major release was announced, and Oracle is once again pushing the virtual ball forward with a major release of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2.

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While perhaps not as polished or as easy to use and configure as competitive desktop virtualization products from Parallels and VMware, the latest release of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2 is getting much closer to that elite group. Throw in the fact that it’s open source software and comes with a palatable price tag (free), the platform becomes that much more interesting, with a cult following of its own.

“As the only free, open source virtualization software that supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and Oracle Solaris platforms, users can install Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2 on their preferred host platform and run a huge variety of guest operating systems in virtual machines,” said Wim Coekaerts, Oracle senior vice president of Linux and Virtualization Engineering.

With the latest release of VirtualBox 4.2, Oracle increases the product’s list of compatible operating systems. It now supports Google ChromeOS, Apple’s Mac OS X 10.8 (aka “Mountain Lion”), and the recently announced Microsoft Windows Server 2012, as well as Fedora 17, Solaris 11, Ubuntu 12.04, and Oracle’s own Linux 6.3.

It’s also added support for the upcoming Microsoft Windows 8 operating system. According to the release notes, developers have done a lot of work to make Windows 8 guest operating systems run more smoothly; in particular, they’ve put in many 3D graphic related fixes. They also fixed a potential host crash problem caused by high guest memory pressure commonly seen with Windows 8 guests.

As host platforms have become more powerful, so too have the guests running inside of them. To accommodate this, VirtualBox 4.2 has added a number of fixes and new capabilities for advanced processors and modern networking.

When installed on top of a CPU that supports Nested Paging and context switching — including most Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs or AMD Bulldozer — VirtualBox 4.2 should bring improved virtual machine performance. While previous releases of VirtualBox had no support for VIA Technologies hardware, this latest release works with some of the more modern VIA CPUs, including the Nano X2.

The hypervisor also includes updates for networking, which provides a huge boost for users using the system in a modern network. For example, prior to this release, the virtual chip set could handle only eight virtual NICs per virtual machine. It now supports up to 36 virtual NICs configured per VM when used in conjunction with an emulated version of Intel’s ICH9 I/O controller hub.

To keep this new capability in check, Oracle has introduced the ability to throttle back network I/O bandwidth on one VM or across groups of VMs sharing a physical network card. This can prevent a rogue VM from stealing the entire pipe and starving other virtual machines in the process.

Going one step further, VirtualBox 4.2 has enhanced the E1000 NIC so that it finally supports 802.1q VLAN tagging, allowing VMs to participate in VLAN environments.

As the host platform becomes more powerful, VirtualBox users are also attempting to run more and more VMs on top of it. Some of these users have large libraries of VMs made up of various operating system types and versions. Other users may have groups of VMs that operate together in a multitiered software solution — for example, a database tier, middleware tier, Web application tier, and so on.

To address the needs of those users, Oracle has updated VirtualBox 4.2 with a more powerful VirtualBox Manager. Three main areas have been updated:

• VM Groups allow the user to organize a VM library, such as by platform type, by project, by version, or some other method, making it more efficient and easier to manage larger numbers of similar virtual machines. But groups are more than just passive folders; you can also perform operations on any number of VMs all at once, through a graphical user interface, a set of APIs or via command-line tools.
• Auto Start provides a more flexible VM startup operation. If a virtual machine doesn’t need any user interaction — that is, it’s running a dedicated service within the VM such as a wiki — it can be treated like any other host service, and the VM can be automatically booted and started when the host machine is powered on.
• Headless VM Launching is now available from the GUI by simply holding down the Shift key when launching the VM from the Manager. You no longer have to launch these types of workload VMs from a command-line interface.

A number of other bug fixes and features have been added to this version, such as support for parallel port pass-through on Windows hosts, burning audio CDs from a guest, bi-directional clipboard control, drag-and-drop of files from the host into Linux guests, and more. You can check out the entire list within the release’s changelog report.

VirtualBox 4.2 appears to be another solid release for Oracle, putting the company one step closer to joining the conversation with VMware and Parallels products. Find out how it competes firsthand by downloading it for free at the VirtualBox community site.

Do you use VirtualBox? Do you prefer it to the VMware or Parallels for pay platforms? If so, why or why not?

This article, “Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2 narrows gap with VMware, Parallels,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.