VirtualBox 3.0.0 adds guest SMP

By Stephen Withers
Thursday, 02 July 2009 07:41

Development

A major new release of Sun's VirtualBox virtualisation software provides three important new features.

VirtualBox comes in two main flavours: there's the Open Source Edition (released under the GPL), and Sun's extended version that is free for personal and evaluation use, otherwise a licence must be purchased.

Features exclusive to the closed-source version are an RDP server, USB support (including USB over RDP), and a virtual SATA controller allowing the connection of more than three virtual hard disks.

VirtualBox can run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris hosts.

The new features in VirtualBox 3.0.0 are support for guest symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) with up to 32 virtual CPUs (requires a physical processor with VT-x or AMD-V support), experimental support for Direct3D 8 and 9 on Windows guests, and support for OpenGL 2.0 on Windows, Linux and Solaris guests.

There's also an extensive list of bug fixes and minor changes concerning various host versions of VirtualBox.

Affected areas include user interface refinements, and changes to networking, 3D graphics, shared folders, VHD (virtual hard drive) handling, and OVF (Open Virtual Machine format) support.