Oracle has announced the release of Oracle VM VirtualBox 7, the latest release of the their popular free, open source, and cross-platform virtualization software.

The latest release is packed with new features. These include integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), enhanced 3D support, an automated virtual machine (VM) builder, and full VM encryption. The new features will help organizations simplify the management of their VMs and help accelerate application deployment in the cloud and on-premises.

And although the adoption of cloud-native development technologies is steadily increasing, many DevOps teams continue to rely on VMs as an essential part of their toolkit.

"VMs provide agility, flexibility, and scalability during development, but DevOps teams can struggle to derive the full value from their VMs and virtualization management software due to the challenges of configuring the VMs for the cloud, managing multiple physical systems, ensuring secure encryption, and working across different operating systems and development platforms," explained Simon Coter, Director, Oracle Linux and Virtualization Product Management, Oracle.  "With Oracle VM VirtualBox 7, we are removing this complexity and directly addressing each of these challenges."

Reducing Operational Costs & Securely Accelerating Application Deployment

VirtualBox runs a wide range of operating systems on a single device simultaneously and helps simplify the export and import of VMs to and from the cloud.

VirtualBox 7 helps customers securely accelerate application deployment while simplifying the management of their VMs on-premises and in the cloud.

Key new features in Oracle VM VirtualBox 7 include:

• OCI Integration: Enables organizations, for the first time, to centrally manage their development and production VMs running on-premises and on OCI instances using any OS that supports VirtualBox, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS. A single button or command exports a VM from an on-premises device and runs it on OCI or imports the VM from OCI to the user's on-premises device.
• Enhanced Monitoring and Management of VMs: Provides organizations, for the first time, with a centralized way to monitor and manage their VirtualBox VMs across OCI and on-premises. The enhanced GUI simplifies monitoring and management of VMs on OCI and on-premises devices by providing a comprehensive, centralized dashboard that graphically shows the resources used by each VM. In addition, it also provides direct console access for VMs running on OCI and enhanced contextual help.
• Automated VM Builder: Enables organizations to accelerate the time to create and run a VM by automating and standardizing the creation of VMs using the unattended installation feature or open source Vagrant boxes. This helps customers save significant time and bring up a new VM in less than a minute. Standardizing VMs also helps reduce errors and improve productivity by ensuring everyone is using the same configuration and ecosystem.
• Full VM Encryption: Enables organizations to use AES 128/256-bit encryption for the VM data, logs, and configuration files without a performance impact. This capability provides the same encryption solution for all supported guest VMs and allows customers to create and share secure VMs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and Oracle Solaris much more cost-effectively than via competitive solutions. In addition, encrypted VMs can be securely shared using USB devices or the cloud.
• Enhanced 3D Support in VMs: Enables organizations to leverage enhanced 3D capabilities for virtual machines including DirectX 11 / OpenGL support. This allows customers to run 3D applications, including conferencing and CAD software, with superior performance on VirtualBox VMs.
• Enhanced Nested Virtualization Support: Enables organizations to leverage nested virtualization by running VMs with Microsoft Windows 10 and 11 fully virtualized, which by default require Hyper-V. As a result, customers can now fully integrate with the latest Microsoft Windows releases and exploit all the OS capabilities while running Windows 10 or 11 on top of VirtualBox.
  

Oracle is also 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. This developer preview represents a work in progress project and provides early access to unsupported software features.