VirtualBox 3.1 released, live migration added

Sun is betting VirtualBox 3.1 will appeal the business market with workloads that can now be “teleported” to another physical host to help achieve high-availability.

Open source virtualization hypervisor VirtualBox has reached version 3.1, which adds the ability to migrate a live virtual machine session between physical hosts.

Sun Microsystems, the commercial backer of VirtualBox, claimed the new live migration feature as the virtualization industry's first "teleportation" capability, allowing running virtual machines to be moved between hosts -- including different operating systems, types of computer (server to client) and CPUs (Intel to AMD).

Other new features in 3.1 include restoration of virtual machine states from arbitrary snapshots, 2D video acceleration for Windows guests and support for more than one optical drive.

On networking side, the network attachment type can now be changed while a VM is running and there is also added support for paravirtualised network adapters.

AMD64 guest support has also received performance improvements, with Sun claiming an increase of 30 per cent over the previous VirtualBox release.

Since acquiring Innotek -- the original developer of VirtualBox -- early last year Sun has made a number of major releases of the product which competes in the desktop virtualization space against more established players like VMware and Parallels.

Betting on Business Appeal

Sun now claims more than 20 million copies of VirtualBox have been downloaded worldwide at a rate of 40,000 per day.

VirtualBox is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris.

With its new live migration ability Sun is betting VirtualBox 3.1 will appeal more to the business market as workloads can be "teleported" to another physical host to help achieve high-availability.

Sun’s vice president of datacenter software marketing, Jim McHugh, said the company is committed to VirtualBox by way of innovation and more frequent releases.

Commercial support is available for VirtualBox with enterprise licence subscriptions starting at $US30 per user per year.

More about: AMD, Intel, Linux, Parallels, Sun Microsystems, VMware
References show all

Comments

1

Richard Taber

Tue 12/01/2010 - 06:02

I am using the virtualbox 3****. My operating system for this virtual box is windows 2000. I am unable to update windows 2000 on the internet. Is there any need for updating the 2000. My main operating system is windows 7 64 bit.

2

jtayl22

Tue 19/01/2010 - 16:16

Richard, try installing Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 before running Windows Update

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the Computerworld comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: desktop virtualisation, open source, Sun Mircosystems, virtualbox, virtualisation
Whitepapers
All whitepapers
Sign up now to get free exclusive access to reports, research and invitation only events.
Featured Download
/downloads/product/19/avg-anti-virus-free-edition/

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition

Note: This review covers version 8.5 of the software. This software is now in version 9.0. Antivirus program AVG 8.5 Free offers solid features and ...

Computerworld newsletter

Join the most dedicated community for IT managers, leaders and professionals in Australia