VirtualBox 4.2 Release Candidate 2 released

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product 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.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, 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 Oracle ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.

Features

Extremely feature rich and high performance
Multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI
Special drivers and utilities to facilitate switching between systems
Guest virtual machine cloning

New August 23rd, 2012 VirtualBox 4.2.0 RC2 available!
There is the second release candidate of the upcoming 4.2 release available.

Get a first impression of the new features

Please do NOT use this VirtualBox Release Candidate on production machines. Entering Release candidate phase means that the feature list is frozen. A VirtualBox Release Candidate is meant for evaluation and testing purposes.

You can download the binaries here.

Please do NOT open bug reports at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Bugtracker but use our VirtualBox Beta/Release Candidate Feedback forum to report any problems with the Release Candidate. Please concentrate on reporting regressions since VirtualBox 4.1.18.

Incomplete list of fixes since VirtualBox 4.2.0 RC1:

Windows 3.x/9x runs without hardware virtualization again (broken in Beta 1)
Booting from SATA disks > 128GB works again (broken in Beta 1)
Mixing AHCI and SCSI controllers produces same disk order as 4.1 (broken in Beta 1)
OS/2 guests with APM.SYS no longer crash during boot (broken in RC1)
64-bit guests on 32-bit OSX Snow Leopard hosts made the host hang
enable "Hypervisor Present bit" for OS X guests
Guest Execute fixes
GUI fixes
EFI fixes
Main: validate group name collision with existing VM names
Main: don't crash during restoring a snapshot if the chipset type changed in the meantime
Disk: allow to restore a VM from a saved state if the VM was moved to a file system where we have to disable async I/O
Linux 3.6 compilation fixes for shared folders
fixed dkms.conf LF problem

VirtualBox 4.2 will be a new major release. The following major new features were added:

Improved Windows 8 support, in particular many 3D-related fixes
GUI: VM groups (bug #288)
GUI: expert mode for wizards
GUI: allow to alter some settings during runtime
Support for up to 36 network cards, in combination with an ICH9 chipset configuration (bug #8805)
Resource control: added support for limiting network IO bandwidth; see the manual for more information
Added possibility to start VMs during system boot on Linux, OS X and Solaris; see the manual for more information (bug #950)
Added experimental support for Drag'n'drop from the host to Linux guests. Support for more guests and for guest-to-host is planned. (bug #81)
Added support for parallel port passthrough on Windows hosts
Enhanced API for controlling the guest; please see the SDK reference and the API documentation for more information

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

Mac OS X hosts: sign application and installer to avoid warnings on Mountain Lion
VMM: improved VM context switch performance for Intel CPUs using nested paging
VMM: added support for FlushByASID features of AMD CPUs (Bulldozer and newer)
VMM: fixed unreal mode handling on older CPUs with VT-x (gPXE, Solaris 7/8/9; bug #9941)
VMM: fixed MP tables fixes for I/O APIC interrupt routing relevant for ancient SMP guests (e.g. old OS/2 releases)
VMM: support recent VIA CPUs (bug #10005)
GUI: network operations manager
GUI: allow taking screenshots of the current VM window content
GUI: allow automatically sorting of the VM list
GUI: allow starting of headless VMs from the GUI
GUI: allow reset, shutdown and poweroff from the Manager window
GUI: allow to globally limit the maximum screen resolution for guests
GUI: show the full medium part on hovering the list of recently used ISO images
GUI: do not create additional folders when a new machine has a separator character in its name (bug #6541)
GUI: don't crash on terminate if the settings dialog is still open (bug #9973)
Snapshots: fixed a crash when restoring an old snapshot when powering off a VM (bug #10491)
Settings: sanitise the name of VM folders and settings file (bug #10549)
Settings: allow to store the iSCSI initiator secret encrypted
E1000: 802.1q VLAN support
Storage: implemented burning of audio CDs in passthrough mode
Storage: implemented support for discarding unused image blocks through TRIM for SATA and IDE and UNMAP for SCSI when using VDI images
Storage: added support for QED images
Storage: added support for QCOW (full support for v1 and readonly support for v2 images)
Storage: added readonly support for VHDX images
Solaris additions: added support for X.org Server 1.11 and 1.12
Windows hosts: no need to recreate host-only adapters after a VirtualBox update
Windows hosts: updated toolchain; make the source code compatible to VC 2010 and enable some security-related compiler options
NAT: improvements for the built-in TFTP server (bugs #7385, #10286)

This list is not complete. This is a Release Candidate and the code still needs some polishing and not all new features are documented yet. Although we already did a lot of testing and don't expect critical regressions, please backup your data before trying this Release Candidate.

Documentation

We provide documentation targeting both end-users and developers:

The User Manual of the current VirtualBox release ( PDF version)

End-user documentation

Technical documentation

Source code repository timeline

List of changes (changelog)

End-user documentationThis page is for end users who are looking for information about how to download and run VirtualBox.
In order to run VirtualBox on your machine, you need:

Reasonably powerful x86 hardware. Any recent Intel or AMD processor should do.

Memory. Depending on what guest operating systems you want to run, you will need at least 512 MB of RAM (but probably more, and the more the better). Basically, you will need whatever your host operating system needs to run comfortably, plus the amount that the guest operating system needs. So, if you want to run Windows XP on Windows XP, you probably won't enjoy the experience much with less than 1 GB of RAM. If you want to try out Windows Vista in a guest, it will refuse to install if it is given less than 512 MB RAM, so you'll need that for the guest alone, plus the memory your operating system normally needs.

Hard disk space. While VirtualBox itself is very lean (a typical installation will only need about 30 MB of hard disk space), the virtual machines will require fairly huge files on disk to represent their own hard disk storage. So, to install Windows XP, for example, you will need a file that will easily grow to several GB in size.

A supported host operating system. Presently, we support Windows (XP and later), many Linux distributions, Mac OS X, Solaris and OpenSolaris.

A supported guest operating system. Besides the user manual (see below), up-to-date information is available at "Status: Guest OSes".

User manualFor up-to-date details, especially on current operating system support and software requirements, please take a look at the current User Manual (online here).

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for end usersThe User FAQ provide common questions and answers not found in the user manual.

HOWTOs and tutorialsThe HOWTOs and tutorials section contains documentation submitted by users about how to do interesting things with VirtualBox.

Download VirtualBox
Here, you will find links to VirtualBox binaries and its source code.

VirtualBox binariesBy downloading, you agree to the terms and conditions of the respective license.

VirtualBox platform packages. The binaries are released under the terms of the GPL version 2.
- VirtualBox 4.1.20 for Windows hosts x86/amd64
- VirtualBox 4.1.20 for OS X hosts x86/amd64
- VirtualBox 4.1.20 for Linux hosts
- VirtualBox 4.1.20 for Solaris hosts x86/amd64

VirtualBox 4.1.20 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack All platforms
Support for USB 2.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP and PXE boot for Intel cards. See this chapter from the User Manual for an introduction to this Extension Pack. The Extension Pack binaries are released under theVirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL).
Please install the extension pack with the same version as your installed version of VirtualBox!
If you are using VirtualBox 4.0.16, please download the extension pack here.