Sun boosts virtualisation performance with VirtualBox 2.0

Stephen Withers
Monday, 08 September 2008 08:12

Business IT - Technology

VirtualBox 2.0.0 is available under a free Personal Use and Evaluation License that also covers academic use. Enterprise licences can be purchased from Sun. Binaries for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris can be downloaded from the VirtualBox web site.

Sun officials claimed VirtualBox enables "a single computer to run multiple OSes and applications simultaneously, with virtually no performance degradation."

There's also an open source version of VirtualBox that lacks certain features of the closed source version, such as the RDP server, the virtual USB and SATA controllers, and the iSCSI initiator. The open source version is likely to show up in Linux distributions.

"Sun xVM VirtualBox software continues to dominate the desktop virtualization space with over 6.5 million downloads to date and rave reviews from press and customers," said Steve Wilson, vice president, xVM, Sun Microsystems.

"Now with xVM VirtualBox 2.0 software and the new enterprise subscription [which starts at $US30 per user per year], customers can confidently roll out xVM VirtualBox software across their business," he added.

The subscription includes round the clock technical support.