Sun xVM VirtualBox 2 enhances the free virtualization experience

Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0 has arrived! We did a detailed review of VirtualBox 1.6 back in July, and now a shiny new version is available. If you want to set up a virtualization environment on your Intel Mac, but don't want to spend money on Parallels or VMWare Fusion, xVM VirtualBox 2.0 is a free and full-featured package that may fit your needs very well.

What's new in version 2.0? Mac users will see the following changes:

• 64-bit OS guest support (only on 64-bit hosts, as one might expect)

• New native Leopard user interface on Mac OS X hosts

• New-version notifier

• Guest property information interface

• Host Interface Networking on Mac OS X hosts

• Framework for collecting performance and resource usage data (metrics)

• Added SATA asynchronous IO (NCQ: Native Command Queuing) when accessing raw disks/partitions (major performance gain)

A list of bug fixes can be viewed after the break. xVM VirtualBox 2.0 can be downloaded here.

Some bugs in earlier versions were squashed as well:

• VMM: VT-x fixes

• AHCI/SATA: improved performance

• GUI: keyboard fixes

• Network: added support for jumbo frames (> 1536 bytes)

• Shared Folders: fixed guest crash with Windows Media Player 11

• Mac OS X: Ctrl+Left mouse click doesn't simulate a right mouse click in the guest anymore. Use Hostkey+Left for a right mouse click emulation.