VirtualBox 3.0.2

VirtualBox 3.0.2 is a really superior family of powerful x86 virtualization products for 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 General Public License (GPL).

VirtualBox runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux 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), and OpenBSD.

VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while innotek ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.

Major Features:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. A number of extra features are available with the full VirtualBox release only
   • 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.

 Enhancements:

• VMM: fixed network regressions (guest hangs during network IO) 
• VMM: guest SMP performance improvements
• VMM: fixed hangs and poor performance with Kaspersky Internet Security 
• VMM: fixed crashes when executing certain Linux guests 
• ACPI: fixed Windows 2000 kernel hangs with IO-APIC enabled 
• APIC: fixed high idle load for certain Linux guests (3.0 regression)
• BIOS: properly handle Ctrl-Alt-Del in real mode
• iSCSI: fixed configuration parsing 
• OVF: fix potential confusion when exporting networks
• OVF: compatibility fix 
• NAT: fixed crashes under certain circumstances 
• 3D support: fixed dynamic linking on Solaris/OpenSolaris guests 
• 3D support: fixed incorrect context/window tracking for multithreaded apps
• Shared Folders: fixed loading from saved state 
• Shared Folders: host file permissions set to 0400 with Windows guest
• X11 host and guest clipboard: fixed a number of issues ... (closed)">
• X11 Additions: fixed some issues with seamless windows in X11 guests
• Windows Additions: added VBoxServiceNT for NT4 guests (for time synchronization and guest properties)
• Windows Additions: fixed version lookup
• Linux hosts: workaround for buggy graphics drivers showing a black VM window on recent distributions
• Linux hosts: fixed typo in kernel module startup script 
• Installer: support Pardus Linux
• Solaris hosts: several installer fixes
• Solaris host: fixed a preemption issue causing VMs to never start on Solaris 10 
• Solaris guest: fixed mouse integration for OpenSolaris 2009.06 
• Windows hosts: fixed high CPU usage after resuming the host 
• OVF: accept ovf:/disk/ specifiers with a single slash in addition to ovf://disk/ 
• Fixed a settings file conversion bug which sometimes caused hardware acceleration to be enabled for virtual machines that had no explicit configuration in the XML.