Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.0

VirtualBox 1.6.0 (released 2008-04-30)

Sun xVM VirtualBox is an X86 virtualization software package originally developed by German software company Innotek GmbH, now a product of Sun’s xVM family, suitable for both enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL). VirtualBox supports Intel’s hardware virtualization VT-x and has experimental support for AMD’s AMD-V, but does not use either of them by default.

vbox16xr6 Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.0

vbox162bp7 Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.0

(testing openSUSE 11 Beta 2 as guest on openSUSE 10.3 x86-64 host running on Dell Inspiron 1525 notebook)

Here are some key features of “VirtualBox”:

· 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.

· Guest Additions for Windows and Linux - VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window).

· Virtual USB Controllers - VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device specific drivers on the host.

· Remote Desktop Protocol - Unlike any other virtualization software, VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to “run” the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data.

· USB over RDP - With this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices that are connected on the RDP client. This way, a powerful server machine can virtualize a lot of thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in.

· Shared folders - Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as “shared folders”, which can then be accessed from within virtual machines.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), OpenBSD and OS/2 Warp.

Currently, there is a proprietary version, VirtualBox, which is free only for personal or evaluation use, subject to the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL) and an Open Source Edition(OSE), VirtualBox OSE, which is free for commercial and private use, subject to Copyleft and other requirements of the GPL license. Please see the Editions page for details.

This 1.6.0 version is a major update and the following major new features were added:

The new Sun livery
Solaris and Mac OS X host support
Seamless windowing for Linux and Solaris guests
Guest Additions for Solaris
A webservice API
SATA hard disk (AHCI) controller
Experimental Physical Address Extension (PAE) support

In addition, the following items were ﬁxed and/or added:

GUI: added accessibility support (508)
GUI: VM session information dialog
VBoxHeadless: renamed from VBoxVRDP
VMM: reduced host CPU load of idle guests
VMM: many ﬁxes for VT-x/SVM hardware-supported virtualization
ATA/IDE: better disk geometry compatibility with VMware images
ATA/IDE: virtualize an AHCI controller
Storage: better write optimization, prevent images from growing unnecessarily.
Network: support PXE booting with NAT
Network: ﬁxed the Am79C973 PCNet emulation for Nexenta guests
NAT: improved builtin DHCP server (implemented DHCPNAK response)
NAT: port forwarding stopped when restoring the VM from a saved state
NAT: make subnet conﬁgurable
XPCOM: moved to libxml2
XPCOM: ﬁxed VBoxSVC autostart race
Audio: SoundBlaster 16 emulation
USB: ﬁxed problems with USB 2.0 devices
MacOS X: ﬁxed seamless mode
MacOS X: better desktop integration, several look’n’feel ﬁxes
MacOS X: switched to Quartz2D framebuffer
MacOS X: added support for shared folders
MacOS X: added support for clipboard integration
Solaris: added host audio playback support (experimental)
Solaris: made it possible to run VirtualBox from non-global zones
Shared Folders: made them work for NT4 guests
Shared Folders: many bugﬁxes to improve stability
Seamless windows: added support for Linux guests
Linux installer: support DKMS for compiling the kernel module
Linux host: compatibility ﬁxes with Linux 2.6.25
Windows host: support for USB devices has been signiﬁcantly improved; many additional USB devices now work
Windows Additions: automatically install AMD PCNet drivers on Vista guests
Linux additions: several ﬁxes, experimental support for RandR 1.2
Linux additions: compatibility ﬁxes with Linux 2.6.25

User Manual (version 1.6, updated 2008-04-30)

So, how will VirtualBox 1.6 will compare to the upcoming VMWare Workstaion 6.5, which is a commercial product.

(No Ratings Yet)

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Comment by David Smith on May 14, 2008

VirtualBox 1.6.0 is so badly broken it may be objectively viewed as an alpha release. Do not attempt to use it in a production environment, and do not upgrade from 1.5.6, unless you are prepared to rebuild all your guest systems from scratch. Even then they may not work. As in: not even boot. This happened to me personally on xp pro and Kubuntu Gutsy hosts (on the same, newish 2.4G Athlon 64 system with 2G of memory). I’m able to run it on xp pro on a separate, dual-core Intel, but the guest additions are partially (mostly?) broken.

These numerous bugs are documented and admitted by VB development team members of their public forum.

I’m having a really hard time understanding why Sun would want it’s name on such an incredibly slipshod release, when Inno had been doing a great job on the product before Sun bought it. Well, whatever. We can only hope they can bring it back up to scratch, and soon.

Comment by JoshuaL on June 13, 2008

Hi, great article,
I recently purchased a dell 1525N myself with ubuntu preinstalled, everything runs fine, but I prefer OpenSuse to Ubuntu. I was wondering if you could tell me what if any tweaks you had to make in OpenSuse to get all the hardware to work?
Thank you kindly,
Joshua

Comment by E@zyVG on June 14, 2008

Well, I got this notebook for my g’friend, and mostly spent just few days to see how it ran with Linux, openSUSE. With 10.3 install I had to install the video driver and the driver for WiFi. WiFi that came with this notebook was Atheros based, and used the MadWiFi driver. Same can be said about the 11.0 RC1 on this notebook.

Nothing special, no tweaks as such. Oh, yups I think I had some problem with Hibernating this notebook.

Comment by Robert on July 07, 2008

I had been using the last version of VirtualBox that was distributed by Innotek on an OpenSuse 10.3 system to emulate WindowsXP and it worked just fine, including connection to the USB devices that were attached to the Linux system. Unfortunately I had to reinstall lately my Linux from scratch and did not have a backup copy of this VirtualBox distribution. So I had to download the Sun xVM Virtualbox version and install that one. Now I can again boot Windows as a guest system on my Linux box: BUT the windows guest doesn’t recognize the USB devices any more. I am wondering what has been changed by Sun and if there is somewhere a solution to this problem. The Sun installation, as is, is worthless for me, because the only reason that I am using Windows is: there is no USB driver for my scanner for Linux.