Oracle announced on July 19th a major release for its desktop virtualization software VirtualBox, hitting version 4.1.0.
Updates for the 4.0.x serie are still being released.
This release introduces some interesting new features, some of which are still to be considered experimental:
- Virtual Machine clones: VirtualBox supports cloning a virtual machine by duplicating its disk and settings. A different MAC address can be assigned to the network interfaces of the cloned machine.
- Linked Clones: clones of a virtual machine can be in a parent-child relationship to save time and disk usage.
- Larger memory support: VirtualBox can now run on physical hosts with up to 1 TeraByte of memory.
- Remote access: VirtualBox provides a remote desktop protocol (RDP) compliant access to the virtual machines running on the physical host, named VRDP. This release adds transport layer security (TLS) support and server authentication to VRDP, allowing avoidance of man in the middle attacks.
- Multiple monitors: this release introduces multiple monitors support for the virtual machines.
- New driver for Windows 7: Oracle developed a new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) for Windows 7 guests, shipped with the guest additions package, to take advantage of transparency and 3D effects. This driver is still experimental.
- UDP tunnelling: VirtualBox 4.1.0 provides a new networking feature to extend the classic host-only configuration for the guest hosts network interfaces, allowing to create a host-only network spanning across multiple physical hosts.
- Mac OS X Lion support: this releases is ready for the latest Mac OS X operating system.
The full changelog is available here. VirtualBox 4.1.0 can be downloaded here.