Oracle today released version 4.3 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This release is the follow up of version 4.2 which was released in September last year.
Virtualbox is a desktop virtualization solution also known as a type-2 Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). VirtualBox can be installed on top of Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux and it can run Windows, Linux and Solaris as guest.
The product was initially developed by innotek, which was acquired by Sun in February 2008, Sun rebranded the product to Sun VM VirtualBox. In April 2009 Sun on its turn was acquired by Oracle, which rebranded the product to Oracle VM VirtualBox. In July this year, Oracle announced that it will stop with the development of their own VDI Sun Ray software and focus fully on the Oracle Secure Global Desktop and VM VirtualBox software.
Version 4.3 provides the following main new features as detailed in the changelog:
- Support for multi touch input devices on Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Mac OS X 10.9
- Improved 3D accelerations for translucent effects in the latest Linux distrubutions Ubuntu and Fedora
- Enhanced multi-monitor support
- New virtual USB webcam device
- New recording session capabilities
- New NAT options allowing VMs to communicate with each other on the same host
- IP v6 support across Bridged, Host-only, Internal and NAT networking modes
- RDP connection support over IPv4 and IPv6 networks for the remote display server