VirtualBox 4.1, a significant new version of Oracle VM VirtualBox has been released today by Oracle. The new version further enhances the world’s most popular, open source, cross-platform, virtualization software.
Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1 significantly increase the usability and flexibility of the product by introducing a powerful new virtual machine cloning facility, enhanced large system support, improved remote access, and expanded platform and application support.
VirtualBox is an extremely feature rich, high performance product that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
VM VirtualBox supports a variety of host operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux and other popular flavors of Linux.
VirtualBox 4.1 is a major update and it contains loads of new features, explained here and in the changelog.
Major new features include:
- Support for cloning of VMs : full clones can be created through the GUI and VBoxManage, linked clones only through VBoxManage
- GUI: enhanced wizard for creating new virtual disks
- GUI: new wizard for copying virtual disks
- GUI: keep the aspect ratio in scale mode (Windows and OSX hosts only)
- VMM: raised the memory limit for 64-bit hosts to 1TB
- Experimental support for PCI passthrough for Linux hosts, see the manual for more information
- Windows guests: Experimental WDDM graphics driver, supporting Windows Aero and providing Direct3D support using a cleaner approach (no need to install the guest drivers in Safe Mode anymore)
- Guest Additions: status of modules and features can now be queried separately by the frontends
- Networking: new network attachment mode “Generic Driver”, which offers an open plugin architecture for arbitrary and separately distributable virtual network implementations
- Host-only Networking: fixed host crash in kernels prior to 2.6.29
- New Networking Mode UDP Tunnel: allows to interconnect VMs running on different hosts easily and transparently, see the manual for more information
- Experimental support for SATA hard disk hotplugging available with VBoxManage
- Solaris hosts: New Crossbow based bridged networking driver for Solaris 11 build 159 and above