Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1 now available!

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Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1, the latest release of the world’s most popular free and open source, cross-platform virtualization software. This release enhances the tight integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, enabling organizations and developers to more easily and flexibly create applications on premise and deploy to the cloud with a few clicks.

Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1 introduces the option to "Import from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure" which allows an Instance or Virtual Machine (VM) environment to run locally on your x86 desktop system.

A key tool for developers and users creating cloud and local applications without the overhead of using a full server environment, Oracle VM VirtualBox runs on standard x86 desktop and laptop computers. It allows users to set up multi-platform virtual machine environments for software development, testing, and general purpose operating system (OS) virtualization, with optional runtime encryption. Software engineers can develop for cloud native environments from within Oracle VM VirtualBox VMs directly on their Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Oracle Solaris machines, making it easier to create multi-tier applications with just a standard laptop.

Oracle VM VirtualBox also enables users to create and update virtual machines locally, including the OS and applications, and then package them into an industry standard file format for easy distribution and cloud deployment in conjunction with Oracle Linux KVM, or other server virtualization solutions.

Oracle VM VirtualBox allows users to run nearly any standard x86 OS to run applications that are not available natively on their systems.

What's New with Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1 ?

The 6.1 release supports the latest guest or host operating systems including: Apple Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, other Linux operating systems, and legacy operating systems. New capabilities in Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1 include:

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Support for Import Appliance: Oracle VM VirtualBox supports the import of VMs from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure by launching the Import Appliance feature.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Enhanced Support for Export Appliance: Extended support for exporting a virtual machine to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, allowing the creation of multiple VMs without re-uploading. The ability to export a VM to the cloud using the more efficient "paravirtialized" variant, and to specify free-form tags for cloud images.

Enhanced Support for Nested Virtualization: Support for nested virtualization on Intel CPUs (AMD CPUs introduced on 6.0) for certain hardware platforms (on supported AMD and Intel CPUs) enables you to install a hypervisor, such as Oracle VM VirtualBox or KVM, on an Oracle VM VirtualBox guest. You can then create and run virtual machines in the guest VM. Support for nested virtualization allows Oracle VM VirtualBox to create a more flexible and sophisticated development and testing environment.
Graphics: Improved 3D support (VBoxSVGA and VMSVGA). Older 3D support (VBoxVGA) has been removed.

GUI: Embedded editors, mouse pointer improvements, improved Virtual Machine Groups, enhanced Storage Settings and more.
Linux Host/Guest: Support for Linux Kernel 5.4.
EFI for Virtual Machines: Updated firmware, NVRAM support, support for APFS filesystem, support for non-standard SATA/NVMe devices, support for Legacy OS X releases.
Virtualization core: Drop recompiler, i.e. running VMs now needs a CPU supporting hardware virtualization.

Technology Preview Features

Shared Clipboard: Experimental feature for file transfers (Windows hosts/guests only at the moment) between VMs. This feature needs to be enabled by VBoxManage (it is disabled by default) and it's not officially supported (Tech Preview).

For the complete list of enhancements and further details check the Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1 Release Notes.

Oracle VM VirtualBox Upgrade Path

Oracle VM VirtualBox can be easily upgraded to the 6.1 release from prior supported releases.

Oracle VM VirtualBox Product Support

Oracle VM VirtualBox supports a variety of "Host" and "Guest" operating systems.

Resources

Documentation