Oracle announced yesterday, September 13th, a new release for its open source, cross-platform virtualization software: VM VirtualBox 4.2.
Oracle VM VirtualBox was originally created by German software company Innotek GmbH, later on purchased by Sun Microsystems and after the acquisition passed on to Oracle to be part of its virtualization products.
The solution allows to manage a large amount of virtual machine, running different operating systems, on the same computer at the same time, it can be installed on an existing host operating system as an application and can be run on various operating systems, including: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Solaris, and OpenSolaris; Since release 3.2.0, also on of Mac OS X
This release introduces some new features added, for instance VM Group, intended to improve network capabilities and provide support for new host and guest OS platforms.
Among the new details of this new release:
- Increased efficiency:
- More flexible VM startup options:
- Networking improvements:
- New platform support
Wim Coekaerts, Oracle senior vice president of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, declares:
As the only free, open source virtualization software that supports Windows, Mac, Linux and Oracle Solaris platforms, users can install Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2 on their preferred host platform and run a huge variety of guest operating systems in virtual machines, Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2 makes it even easier and more efficient for users to manage virtual machines with VM Groups, new startup options, and new network tuning capabilities.