VirtualBox Making Waves as Open Source Virtualization Platform

The youngest virtualization player to enter the x86 virtualization market is Innotek. And the company has recently announced a new release of its product, VirtualBox version 1.4.0, for Windows and Linux. The new version, like its predecessors, is available as both open source under the GPL as well as under a commercial license which allows you to use the product free of charge (in most cases).

The latest release also brings the fledgling virtualization product into the Apple MAC OS X market, where it will go up against veteran VMware and Parallels as they fight for Mac virtualization dominance.

Some of the new features and improvements found in VirtualBox 1.4.0 include:

• Added support for OS X hosts

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) and Xandros Desktop 4.1 are officially supported

• Improved support for FreeBSD and OpenBSD guest operating systems

• Full support for 64-bit Linux hosts has been added

• Signed all executables and device drivers on Windows

• Added user interface for Shared Folders

• Added configuration options for clipboard synchronization

• Significantly increased maximum guest memory size

• Experimental support for VMDK images (writethrough mode only, no snapshots yet)

• Added raw host disk support, including individual partitions

• Corrected a number of RDP issues and added RDP session shadowing

• The GUI has been translated into 12 different languages

• Allows more than one card configured for NAT networking

• Rewrote Windows USB handling without the need for a filter driver

In addition to these updates, you can view the full 1.4 changelog, here.

You can also download the product, free of charge, here.