Canonical Releases Multipass 0.7 With VirtualBox Windows/macOS Support

One of the projects in development the past two years that's been less trumpeted by Ubuntu maker Canonical has been Multipass, but this utility has reached a new milestone today with new capabilities.

Multipass is an open-source project by Canonical that makes it easy to spin up virtual Ubuntu instances on Ubuntu/Linux itself as well as other operating systems. Multipass aims to orchestrate the creation/management/maintenance of Ubuntu VMs/images.

With today's Multipass 0.7 release, they have added initial support for Oracle VM VirtualBox support on Windows and macOS. Multipass has already supported Windows with Hyper-V back-ends but now with the VirtualBox back-end makes it easier for users to deploy should they prefer (or not have access to) Hyper-V. Likewise, on macOS the VirtualBox back-end is now an alternative to HyperKit.

Beyond introducing VirtualBox support, Multipass 0.7 has been working on concurrency/responsiveness improvements, fixes for launching Ubuntu 19.04 VMs, and a variety of other fixes and enhancements.

The announcement on Ubuntu's Discourse indicates Multipass 0.7 to be a beta release while on the GitHub page it's now an official release, but whatever it is, the Snaps, Windows, and macOS binaries are now available along with the sources. This Ubuntu VM/instance manager is under the GPLv3 license.