Oracle VM VirtualBox 7, the latest release of the company’s open source, cross-platform virtualization software, integrates with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for remote control of cloud-hosted VMs, adds support for fully encrypted VMs, enhances 3D video support, and features an automated virtual machine builder.
The upgrade was unveiled October 12. VirtualBox 7 is intended to help devops engineers and distributed teams increase productivity, easing the creation and management of VMs and removing the complexity of configuring them for the cloud. Management of multiple physical systems is also addressed in the new release.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integration in VirtualBox 7 enables users to centrally manage development and production VMs running either on-premises or on OCI instances using any VirtualBox-supported operating system, such as Linux, Windows, and MacOS. With a single command or button push, users can export a VM from an on-premises host and run it on OCI, or import a VM from OCI to the user’s local computer.
Oracle VM VirtualBox is downloadable from oracle.com. Other capabilities in VirtualBox 7:
- For management of VMs, an enhanced GUI simplifies management of VMs on OCI and on-premises devices, providing a centralized dashboard showing resources used by each VM.
- An automated VM builder accelerates the time to build and run a VM by automating the creation of VMs using the unattended installation feature or open source Vagrant boxes. VMs can be brought up in less than a minute.
- Full encryption of VMs uses AES 128-bit or 256-bit encryption for VM data, logs, and configuration files without impacting performance.
- Enhanced 3D support in VMs using DirectX 11/OpenGL support. 3D applications can be run including conferencing and CAD.
- Enhanced nested virtualization supports running VMs with Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows 11 fully virtualized, which by default require Hyper-V.
Oracle is providing a developer preview of an installer package for macOS/Arm64 systems using an Apple Silicon CPU to run some guest operating systems for Intel/AMD x86 CPUs in emulation. The preview is a work in progress and provides early access to unsupported software features. VirtualBox 6.0 arrived in December 2018.