VirtualBox 3.1 Beta teleports in

Sun developers have announced the beta version of VirtualBox 3.1. The new beta release includes a number of major new features. Teleportation allows virtual machines, while running, to be moved from one machine to another. Virtual machine states can now be preserved in any snapshot and support has been added for branched snapshots. Windows guests will find 2D video acceleration has been enabled; this will use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and colour conversion. VirtualBox 3.1 beta now allows the attached network type to be changed while a virtual machine is running and it introduces experimental support for recent OpenSolaris USB enhancements and for EFI (Extended Firmware Interface).

The developers say they have achieved significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests and have fixed almost thirty outstanding issues. The beta version is, as always, not recommended for production use. Although the developers have tried to maintain compatibility between VM configuration files, there are some exceptions; when a backwards-incompatible change is made to a configuration file, the file's version number will be incremented making it unusable with previous versions of VirtualBox. For this reason, they recommend that all configuration files should be backed up before use.

VirtualBox 3.1 beta binaries are available to download and the developers request that bug reports be posted to the forum where the beta was announced. VirtualBox is released under the GPLv2 and VirtualBox binaries are released under the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL) licence.

(djwm)