VirtualBox 5.0 tested
Virtualization programs allow users to launch or install a foreign system within a software environment. One of the most popular of these programs is VirtualBox, which is free for personal use. A major update of VirtualBox to version 5 was released in June.
Virtualization solutions have been put to a variety of uses. Deployed on servers, they cleanly isolate services and ensure uniform load balancing between hardware resources. On desktops, they provide a convenient solution for testing or using other systems. Linux users in particular frequently rely on them to work with the occasional, indispensable Windows application.
Since 2005, VirtualBox [1] has vied for the attention of the customers and competed with commercial offerings from VMware [2] and Parallels [3]. The project, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008 and, in turn, by Oracle in 2010, has now published a major release: version 5. I put VirtualBox through its paces to see what's new or different.
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