Oracle Releases VirtualBox 4.2 Beta 1

Oracle has put out their first (beta) development release of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2. The 4.2 release series brings several new features to this easy-to-use virtualization platform.

Key features of VirtualBox 4.2 Beta 1 include improved support for Microsoft Windows 8, the GUI has an expert mode for wizards, support for up to 36 network cards, support for limiting network I/O bandwidth to virtual machine guests, support for starting VMs during system boot, and experimental support for drag 'n' drop from the host to Linux guests. Additionally, more support for guest and guest-to-host drag 'n' drop is planned.

Some of the other improvements include improved VM context switch performance for Intel CPUs using nested paging, support for FlushByASID on AMD Bulldozer CPUs and newer, support for recent VIA CPUs with virtualization, a GUI network operations manager, 802.1q VLAN support, various storage enhancements, and plenty of other random work and fixes.

For those interested in more information about VirtualBox 4.2 Beta 1 or to download it for Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows systems, see this VirtualBox Forums thread.