Virtualization Magazine on Ulitzer

Behaving like it's got a future, Sun Monday put out what it calls a significant new version of VirtualBox, its open-source cross-platform virtualization software.

The new VirtualBox 3.1 is supposed to be capable of "teleportation," an industry first. It means that running virtual machines can be moved uninterrupted between disparate hosts, even hosts on different operating systems, different classes of computer (like server to client) and different CPUs (like Intel to AMD).

The high-availability functionality is supposed to let system administrators do maintenance with zero downtime. Meanwhile, improved snapshotting should let them move a VM back or forward in time to any arbitrary snapshot state.

Sun has tinkered with VirtualBox' execution speed and says optimized memory handling delivers performance increases of 30% over the previous release.

There's also a new high-speed paravirtualized network driver pushing network performance and delivering increased throughput, while reportedly reducing CPU cycles, and the display performance of Windows guests should be better because of new 2D Video Acceleration.

Sun claims VirtualBox has been downloaded more than 20 million times since October 2007, seeing in excess of 40,000 downloads a day. It's all of 50MB and is supposed to install in just a few minutes.

The free code for personal use is here.

Sun charges $30 per user per year to start for wider deployments within an organization and enterprise licenses or subscriptions are available. The paid stuff includes 24/7 support.