Oracle unleashes Version 3.2.0 of VirtualBox

As Oracle continues to digest and dissect the virtualization acquisitions that it’s made, it’s clear that VirtualBox has now officially escaped the chopping block Oracle has continued to develop and introduce significant new features and improvements to the virtualization platform, and the company announced a new version last week: Version 3.2.0. This is the first version of VirtualBox to bear the Oracle logo, and it has received a new name in the process: Oracle VM VirtualBox.

In spite of surpassing 26 million downloads worldwide since October 2007 and receiving in excess of 40,000 downloads per day, VirtualBox may be one of the best-kept secrets among the world of Type 2 hypervisors or hosted virtualization platforms (it is installed on top of an existing host operating system). VirtualBox is a full, general-purpose virtualizer for x86 hardware that is targeted at server, desktop, and embedded use. And unlike its competition, it’s free and open source.

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This hosted virtualization platform has had quite a career for not being a part of the more famous virtualization establishments such as Citrix, Microsoft, Parallels, or VMware. The open source virtualization project is based upon the work of a German company called Innotek. In January 2007, the platform moved from a proprietary software license to an open source edition released as free software under the GNU GPL. In February 2008, Innotek and VirtualBox were scooped up by Sun Microsystems, and the product name was eventually changed to Sun xVM VirtualBox. But let’s face it, no matter what Sun or Oracle does with the naming, users are simply going to continue to call it VirtualBox.

According to Oracle, Version 3.2.0 moves VirtualBox forward in three main areas, delivering significant improvements in performance, power, and supported guest operating system platforms.

VirtualBox 3.2.0 works with all of the latest Westmere variants of Intel’s Core i5 and i7 processors for desktops and the Xeon 5600 series for servers. With these newer processors, Intel has added a new feature called unrestricted guest execution, which is now a supported feature in VirtualBox. If nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which generally speeds up operating system boot times for guest operating systems running on VirtualBox. Large Page support has also been enabled with Intel VT-x and AMD-V technologies, providing faster lookups and shorter table creation times, which can also boost the performance of guest virtual machines.

Oracle has also completely revamped the virtual disk subsystem used by VirtualBox. It now makes use of asynchronous I/O to enhance the performance of the file system while still maintaining high data integrity. The virtual networking subsystem has also been tweaked to reduce context switching between guests and host, allowing virtual network bandwidth to increase by up to 25 percent.

Memory improvements have also been made, which in turn can help improve the virtual machine density of the system. Oracle has added a new feature called memory ballooning, which can change the amount of memory of a virtual machine while the machine is running. Normally, this process requires the virtual machine to be shut down. With memory ballooning, memory allocated for a virtual machine can be given to another virtual machine without having to be shut down. Effectively, this is memory overcommitment for multiple virtual machines while they are still running.

Page Fusion is another interesting technique used by VirtualBox to improve virtual machine density. The idea here is that virtual machines can often be very similar and contain a number of identical RAM cells. The hypervisor can look for duplicate data in memory, eliminate the redundancy with deduplication, and free up additional memory. VirtualBox uses the VirtualBox Guest Additions to identify duplicate memory cells with almost no additional overhead to the system.

Another handy feature is the addition of Hot-plug vCPUs The new VirtualBox supports adding and removing virtual CPUs while a virtual machine is still running. This allows virtual machines to be given more power as needed on the fly with zero downtime of the guest. Unfortunately, this feature is currently limited to guest operating systems that support it, such as Windows Server 2008 x64 Data Center Edition (only supports hot-add) and Linux with the 2.6 kernel (supports hot-add and hot-remove).

With the latest release, Oracle is also addressing the virtualization video challenge with a new Remote Video Acceleration feature. The built-in VirtualBox Remote Display Protocol is primarily used in virtual desktop infrastructure deployments. It has been enhanced to deliver video acceleration in order to provide a rich user experience coupled with reduced computational expense, which is vital when servers are running hundreds of virtual machines. On the client side, Windows 7 Remote Desktop Connection is the only client that supports this feature.

VirtualBox has also been known for its deep list of supported guest operating systems. The virtualization platform is designed to provide a generic virtualization environment for x86 systems. Because of that, it can run a host of 32- and 64-bit operating systems, even those that aren’t officially supported by Oracle. The list includes such old favorites as DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows NT 4.0, Solaris, BSD Unix, and OS/2 Warp 4.5.

With Version 3.2.0, Oracle adds to its already long list of supported operating systems by introducing support for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5, Canonical Ubuntu 10.04, and, the most interesting addition of them all, VirtualBox adds experimental support for Mac OS X Server. This appears to be a grey area for now, but experimental support seems to be limited to running Snow Leopard Server in a virtual machine running on Apple-branded hardware. Don’t forget — you need to have additional licenses for each of the virtual machines running the guest operating system. Apple may yet respond otherwise.

For more information, you can read the VirtualBox 3.2 release notes. To get started on your journey, you can now download the free hypervisor. The software is free for personal use, but Oracle also offers commercial support licenses for $50 per user.

This article, “Oracle unleashes new version of VirtualBox” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of David Marshall’s Virtualization Report blog and follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.