Oracle has released VirtualBox 4.2 beta 1 today, which includes some major improvements, like improved Windows 8 support, an expert mode for wizards, experimental support for drag'n'drop from the host to Linux guests and more.

Improved Windows 8 support, in particular many 3D-related fixes

GUI: VM groups

GUI: expert mode for wizards

GUI: allow to alter some settings during runtime

Support for up to 36 network cards, in combination with an ICH9 chipset configuration

Resource control: added support for limiting network IO bandwidth

Added possibility to start VMs during system boot on Linux, OS X and Solaris

Added experimental support for Drag'n'drop from the host to Linux guests. Support for more guests and for guest-to-host is planned.

Support recent VIA CPUs

Allow taking screenshots of the current VM window content

Allow automatically sorting of the VM list

Allow starting of headless VMs from the GUI

GUI: network operations manager

Improved VM context switch performance for Intel CPUs using nested paging

Added support for FlushByASID features of AMD CPUs (Bulldozer and newer)

Added readonly support for VHDX images, QED images and for QCOW (full support for v1 and readonly support for v2) images

Bug fixes

Since VirtualBox 4.2 is in beta, you will find bugs so don't use this on a production machine! If you encounter bugs, report them on the VirtualBox Beta Feedback forum . For instance, in my test using Linux (Ubuntu) for both the guest and host machine, the new experimental drag'n'drop feature didn't work for some reason - if you figure out how to get it to work, let us know in the comments!





For how to use some of the new features, like limiting network I/O bandwidth or staring a VM on system boot, see the VirtualBox manual, available via the download link below.

Download VirtualBox 4.2 beta 1 for Linux, Windows or Mac OS X for Linux, Windows or Mac OS X

Note: to be able to install VirtualBox 4.2 beta 1 in Ubuntu, you must firstly remove any installed VirtualBox version. For instance, if you have installed the latest stable VirtualBox 4.1 , remove it using the following command:

sudo apt-get remove virtualbox-4.1

And then simply install the VirtualBox 4.2 beta 1 downloaded deb file.