In 2006, virtualization news and technology really started to take off, and everyone anticipated what was going to happen next in 2007. Here we are two weeks into the new year and already we have an unexpected virtualization twist. You may not be familiar with the company or the product just yet, but the German software company, InnoTek, is shaping up to make a name for itself in 2007. InnoTek has announced that In 2006, virtualization news and technology really started to take off, and everyone anticipated what was going to happen next in 2007. Here we are two weeks into the new year and already we have an unexpected virtualization twist. You may not be familiar with the company or the product just yet, but the German software company, InnoTek, is shaping up to make a name for itself in 2007. InnoTek has announced that it has made its virtualization solution, VirtualBox, available as open-source under the GNU General Public License (GPL). VirtualBox appears to be a fairly mature virtualization platform that runs on 32-bit Linux and Windows hosts. It has a pretty impressive list of guest operating system support that includes Windows NT 4, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Windows Vista, OS/2 Warp, Linux with kernel 2.4 and 2.6, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The company describes VirtualBox as “a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use.” With its large feature set and small footprint, VirtualBox has long outgrown its initial purpose of a specialized virtualization solution. As a result, the company is now making VirtualBox generally available as a standalone solution for enterprises of any size – as well as for developers who are searching for a professional, yet flexible and open virtualizer. In a similar manner to other virtualization platform providers, InnoTek has divided their product into two editions: an open-source version and a full version for enterprise customers that comes with additional features. Some of the features of VirtualBox are: Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don’t have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox. Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers. Guest Additions for Windows and Linux. VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window). A number of extra features are available with the full VirtualBox release only: Virtual USB Controllers. VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device specific drivers on the host. Remote Desktop Protocol. Unlike any other virtualization software, VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to “run” the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data. USB over RDP. With this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices that are connected on the RDP client. This way, a powerful server machine can virtualize a lot of thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in. Shared folders. Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as “shared folders”, which can then be accessed from within virtual machines. For more information about the product, visit the product’s Web site. Software Development