Oracle Builds Upon VirtualBox With 3.2 Beta

While Oracle has yet to put out OpenSolaris 2010.03 and they have disbanded other open-source projects formerly under Sun's umbrella, they are moving full-steam ahead with Virtualbox. This morning Oracle has put out the VirtualBox 3.2 Beta, which re-brands itself as Oracle VM VirtualBox.

Beyond changing around the branding to reflect Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the 3.2 Beta of VirtualBox offers experimental support for Mac OS X guests, memory ballooning support to dynamically change the amount of RAM exposed to guest VMs, CPU hot-plugging for Linux and some Windows guests, new hypervisor features, support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running, support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI, USB tablet/keyboard emulation, RDP video acceleration, NAT engine configuration, and support for executing guest applications from the host system.

This is quite a nice set of features, albeit some will be disappointed that there are no plans for a Gallium3D driver for VirtualBox. VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts should also provide faster performance via the new VirtualBox hypervisor features and there are various other features and bug-fixes in this release too.

The release notes with feature list for Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2 Beta 1 can be found on the VirtualBox mailing list.