VirtualBox 3.1 Beta 1 Released

SUN announced on their forums, the release of the first beta of VirtualBox 3.1, the next major update of the popular virtualization software which includes some really interesting changes, such as:

• Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one machine to another
• VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well (aka branched snapshots)
• 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and colour conversion
• The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
• Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher.
• Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
• Experimental support for EFI (Extended Firmware Interface)
• VirtIO network device support

And of course, a lot of bug fixes.

Download VirtualBox 3.1 Beta 1 (downloads available for Windows, SunOS, Mac OSX and Linux: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, Red Hat, PcLinuxOS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and TurboLinux).

If you want to try out different Linux distributions in VirtualBox, don't forget the ready to use vbox images.