VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.
Some of the features of VirtualBox are:
- Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don"t have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox.
- Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.
VirtualBox v5.0 is a major update. The following major new features were added:
- Paravirtualization support for Windows and Linux guests to improve time-keeping accuracy and performance (see the manual for more information)
- Make more instruction set extensions available to the guest when running with hardware-assisted virtualization and nested paging. Among others this includes: SSE 4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX-2, AES-NI, POPCNT, RDRAND and RDSEED
- xHCI Controller to support USB 3 devices (see the manual for more information)
- Drag and drop support (bidirectional) for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
- Disk image encryption (see the manual for more information)
- VMs can now be started in separate mode. The VM process is started headless while the frontend runs as a separate process which can be terminated without stopping the VM.
- GUI: VM guest-content scaling support (including 3D acceleration)
- GUI: New User Interface settings page for customizing status-bar, menu-bar and guest-content scaling
- GUI: New Encryption settings tab for customizing encryption options for disk images
- GUI: HiDPI support including application icons and optional unscaled HiDPI output on Mac OS X (including 3D acceleration)
- GUI: Hotplugging support for SATA disks
- New, modular audio architecture for providing a better abstraction of the host audio backends
- Support for the NDIS6 networking framework on Windows (default on Vista and later)
- ...and much more (full release notes)
Download: VirtualBox 5.0 | 111.0 MB (Open Source)
View: VirtualBox Home Page