SCIENCE

Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0.

Part of Oracle’s comprehensive portfolio of virtualization solutions, Oracle VM VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop computers to run multiple guest operating systems simultaneously, allowing users to get the most flexibility and utilization out of their PCs, and supports a variety of host operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, most popular flavors of Linux (including Oracle Linux), and Oracle Solaris.

Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0 delivers increased capacity and throughput to handle greater workloads, enhanced virtual appliance capabilities, and significant usability improvements.

Support for the latest in virtual hardware, including chipsets supporting PCI Express, further extends the value delivered to customers, partners and developers.

Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0 continues to deliver on Oracle’s commitment to open source.

Enhanced Virtual Desktop Performance and Usability

Highlights of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0:

New Open Architecture – Oracle and community developers can now create extensions that customize Oracle VM VirtualBox and add features not previously available.

Enhanced Usability – A new scalable display mode enables users to view more virtual displays on their existing monitors. Improvements to VM management, including visual VM previews, an optional attributes display, and easy launch shortcut creation enables administrators and power users to customize the interface to make it as simple or as comprehensive as required.

Increased capacity and throughput – A new asynchronous I/O model for networked (iSCSI) and local storage delivers significant storage related performance improvements, while new optimizations allow larger datacenter-class workloads, such as Oracle's middeware, to be run on 32-bit Windows hosts for testing and demo purposes.

Powerful virtual appliance sharing capabilities – Enhanced support for standards-compliant OVF appliances and added support for OVA format descriptors. All information about a VM may be stored in a single folder to facilitate easier direct sharing among VMs.

Support for latest virtual hardware – A new, modern virtual chipset supporting PCI Express and other hardware enhancements including high definition audio devices helps ensure support for the most demanding virtual workloads.