Virtualization

Oracle-backed FOSS hypervisor a worthy rival to Hyper-V and VMware

HANDS ON VirtualBox 7.2 is here, bringing improved Arm-on-Arm virtualization features and better 3D acceleration support.

The major update came out last week, and The Reg FOSS desk has been putting it through its paces. This version has some worthwhile improvements in its 3D handling, which we're already finding useful, and some others for Arm virtualization that we don't have the kit to try at the moment – but which may be helpful to others.

VBox (as we call it for short) 7.2 follows nearly a year after 7.1 came out in September 2024. We're glad to see it, because VBox 7.1 consistently gave us problems: enabling 3D acceleration tended to cause guests to crash – mainly Linux guests for us, but we also had problems while we were looking at Windows 10 LTSC, the version that's still supported and will be for years to come. Despite six maintenance releases, this never went away, and we saw it on Linux, Windows, and Mac hosts.

It has only been a week so far, but for us, VBox 7.2 seems to fix that, and 3D accelerated guests are stable once again. This is especially important since several common Linux desktops always use 3D compositing now, and run poorly without it (this includes GNOME and Cinnamon). Support for NVMe drives in guests is now included in the base hypervisor.

Version 7.2 also adds support for running the Arm version of Windows virtualized on Arm hosts running Windows, complete with Arm-native guest additions. The previous version only officially supported Arm versions of Linux and BSD on macOS hosts, and the way it now works means that an Arm VM paused on a VBox 7.1 host can't be resumed once the host is upgraded to 7.2.

This release also looks slightly different, with a new vertical toolbar down the left of the main program window that holds global tools such as the list of VMs, media, extensions and so on.

Our Extensions menu is blissfully empty, because this screen is where you would find the VirtualBox Extension Pack. This is a free download – an optional and separately licensed installation package – but we don't recommend it. It's handy, but it costs money to use it in production. The Extension Pack adds support for USB 3.0 and USB passthrough, network-booting VMs, remote access to VMs over RDP, and encrypting their virtual disks. For us, it's not a deal-breaker to live without any of these features – we don't need any of them.

If you absolutely require any of this stuff, then watch out. While the main app is GPL3 Free Software, the Extension Pack is separately licensed under Oracle's Personal Use and Educational License, which means it could land you with a bill. The desktop versions of VMware are freeware even for production use now, so maybe try that instead.

The Reg FOSS desk runs Linux VMs on other OSes almost every day, and we still rate VBox as our desktop hypervisor. The same app runs identically on Linux, macOS, and Windows hosts, and VMs can be moved freely between them. This saves us remembering how to drive different editions of VMware and UTM on macOS. We have of course tried Hyper-V on Windows hosts, and while it works and it's a standard feature, we find its performance painfully slow.

On Linux, virtualization is built in, and there are easy graphical front ends such as Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager), or GNOME Boxes for GNOME users. They do have advantages. For instance, virt-manager excels at transparently managing remote hypervisors over the network, and it's great for managing virtual networks and virtual storage – but we rarely need that, and find it clunky for graphical guests. Meanwhile, Boxes is about as simple as desktop virtualization gets, to the extent that we find it tricky to adjust the parameters of guest machines. We occasionally use both UTM and VMware, but both lack a function for grabbing screenshots of guests, which is a core tool for this vulture.

VirtualBox is good, it's free, it's cross-platform, and it just does the job, simply and efficiently. For us, it remains our default tool, and the new version fixes the issue that kept us on version 7.0 for the last year. ®