Sun boosts virtualisation performance with VirtualBox 2.0

By Stephen Withers
Monday, 08 September 2008 08:12

Technology

Sun has rolled out a major update to the open source and commercial versions of its VirtualBox virtualisation software.

Virtualisation software such as VirtualBox allows the use of one or more 'guest' operating systems that run under the control of a 'host' OS. For example, a Windows developer might want to test programs under XP as well as Vista without needing multiple computers, or a Mac user may wish to run one or two Windows-only programs without having to reboot the computer into a different OS.

Another type of virtualisation software known as a hypervisor does away with the host OS. The hypervisor - Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware's ESX - sits between multiple operating systems and the hardware.

VirtualBox became a Sun product when the company acquired Germany-based Innotek in February 2008, adding the software to its xVM family.

New features delivered in version 2 include support for 64-bit guest OSes when the host is also 64-bit, support for SATA Native Command Queuing for improved performance, and support for VHD disk images as used by other virtualisation software.

Other new or improved features include the adoption of Qt4 in place of Qt3, a native Leopard UI for Mac OS X hosts, changes to Host Interface Networking, support for Nested Paging on AMD CPUs, and fixes for certain networking, shared folder and peripheral issues.

What's the difference between the open and closed source versions, and how much is a support subscription? Please read on.