« Virtualizing OS X Tiger  |  From The Open Road: Will “good enough” virtualization topple VMware? »

 

Sun VirtualBox 3.0 released

Sun has just released an update version to their free, open source desktop virtualization client, VirtualBox. They are saying the major feature is that they now provide support for SMP (multiple CPUs) for their virtual guests! In addition to that, they have improved 3D support (not that it was too shabby before).

Also, remember that this is available for download on all major OSes (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and even Solaris).

For being a free virtualizer, VirtualBox is definitely some good competition for products like VMware Workstation/Fusion and Parallels. It doesn’t seem to support 64-bit guests yet, though.

Check out the full Changelog and try it out! Let us know what you think!

Edit: stu pointed out that 64-bit guests are in fact supported, but you have to have VT/AMD-V support on your CPU. Most modern systems have this these days, however the desktop I used when I tried it on did not. This was my mistake for assuming it wasn’t supported.

Tags: , , ,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Sun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

 

2 Responses to “Sun VirtualBox 3.0 released”

 
  1. stu Says: June 30th, 2009 at 6:55 pm

    64 bit guests have been available for a while http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html#intro-64bitguests :)

  2. Todd Says: June 30th, 2009 at 7:01 pm

    Oh, My mistake. When I tried it in the last version (2.2.4) I had trouble… however this is because the desktop I tried it on does not have VT/AMD-V support on the CPU (An original Athlon64 X2, socket 939). I never thought to try it on another machine and just assumed it wasn’t supported.

    Thank you for pointing that out! I will edit the main post to clarify.

 

Leave a Comment