Virtual Box 3.2.0 Beta 1 supports OS X as a virtualized OS

In the release notes of the latest beta of Virtual Box, the folks over at Sun Microsystems have stated that they have implemented experimental support for Mac OS X as a guest operating system on Apple hardware.

Take a look at the features:

VirtualBox Version 3.2.0 is a major update. The following major new features were added:
• Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility.
• Experimental support for Mac OS X guests
• Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)
• CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)
• New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)
• Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
• Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI (see the manual for more information)
• USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available
• LsiLogic SAS controller emulation
• RDP video acceleration
• NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
• Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system
• OVF: enhanced OVF support with custom namespace to preserve settings that are not part of the base OVF standard

Interestingly, OS X’s terms of use does not allow it to be virtualized legally. The only Apple-approved way of virtualized OS X is with OS X Server. Does this mean a legal fight is coming between Apple and Sun? I’ll go out on a limb, and say “Yes” unless there was some backdoor dealing already between the companies.

What do you think about this chess move from Sun? Comment on this post or hit me up on Twitter

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Photo Credit: Silveira Neto