OStatic

Last year, I wrote a post on the precipitous share price drop, CEO ouster, and overall malaise that virtualization player VMware has seen as free, open source competition has threatened the company and its proprietary business model. VMware has released an open source virtualization client since then, as well as many other open source tools. Today, Matt Asay and David Cappuccio consider whether there are several analogs between Novell and VMware, and what lies ahead for VMware's proprietary model.

As JKOnTheRun reports, Sun Microsystems is out with the third version of its free virtualization software VirtualBox, downloadable here. You can take a screenshot tour here. VirtualBox 3.0 now supports Open GL 2.0 as well as Direct 3D 8/9 in Windows. Also included is the ability for guest operating systems to use up to 32 virtual CPUs. You can view the substantial changelog here. VirtualBox might not be as glitzy, glamorous or functional for games as solutions from Parallels or VMware, but you can?t beat the price, says the JKOnTheRun post. It?s definitely a must-see if you want to run multiple operating systems at the same time on a Windows, Mac or Linux machine.