Sun enhances VirtualBox with Version 2.1 updates

It was almost a year ago that Sun Microsystems announced its acquisition of innotek, the creator of the open-source virtualization software called VirtualBox.

The acquisition was meant to extend Sun’s xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market. Fast-forward, and Sun continues to expand on its desktop-to-datacenter virtualization portfolio. The company recently announced a new update to its free virtualization software, VirtualBox 2.1.

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Despite the version numbering, this update doesn’t appear to be a minor dot release of features, updates, and fixes. Instead, the product offers quite a few new enhancements, including:

• Improved Network Performance: Makes network-intensive applications like rich media (video, audio, interactive media, etc.) even faster. In addition, with new bridged networking configurations on Windows and Linux platforms, xVM VirtualBox software makes it easier to deploy server applications in virtual machines, allowing customers to easily deploy Web stacks like LAMP or SAMP. This update has proven to be quite popular with VirtualBox users.
• New Accelerated 3D Graphics: Uses the industry standard application programming interface (API) for high-performance graphics, Open Graphics Library (OpenGL), allowing users to flawlessly run applications like Google Earth and CAM-based software that are popular among heavy users of imagery like industrial designers, automotive and robotics engineers, architects, etc.
• Storage Support: Comes with built-in iSCSI support to connect to storage systems, such as Sun’s newly announced Open Storage appliances, the Sun Storage 7000 family, also known as “Amber Road.” This feature enables easier management and sharing of virtual disk images.

In addition, xVM VirtualBox 2.1 software offers improved support for:

• Mac OS X on Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x): Provides better support for Mac OS X as a host OS utilizing hardware-assisted Intel VT-x for better performance.
• VMware’s and Microsoft’s Virtualization Formats: Offers improved support for VMware’s virtual machine disk format (VMDK) and Microsoft’s virtual hard disk (VHD) file format, allowing for easy transfer of critical business information.
• Intel Core i7 processor: Enables extremely fast performance on leading-edge hardware with support for the new Intel Core microarchitecture in the Intel Core i7 processor (code-named Nehalem).
• 64-bit guest OS on 32-bit host platforms: Allows users to run powerful 64-bit guest OS on 32-bit host platforms without the need to upgrade the host OS while taking advantage of multithread applications on powerful hardware.

The virtualization software has been promoted as a technology for software developers and testers. However, virtualization enthusiasts seem to be attracted to the software as well. Sun faces stiff competition in this desktop virtualization market from a long list of characters such as VMware, Parallels, Red Hat, and the KVM community.

But with its free price tag and open-source nature, Sun has witnessed the product’s growing popularity — surpassing 8 million downloads worldwide. And while downloads alone doesn’t necessarily signify actual usage of the software, the fact that more than 2.5 million people registered the software since October 2007 gives us a pretty good idea of how many people are actually using VirtualBox.

With an impressive 25,000 downloads a day, and downloads up 120 percent over last quarter, Sun seems to be doing a good job at breaking through the noise of the desktop virtualization market.