Oracle VirtualBox 7.1: 4 things to know about the new release

Oracle VirtualBox 7.1 was released with several new features which can give your team a major boost. This blog takes a deeper dive into four of the most important features in the 7.1 release. This includes support for Arm architecture, enhancements to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the experience levels feature, and the log collector tool.

1) Adding Apple Silicon Support

With Oracle VirtualBox 7.1 release, VirtualBox now supports Arm architecture for host and guest. Apple silicon can be used as the host machine. Several Linux distributions for Arm64 are supported for the guest. Supported Linux distributions include:

• Oracle Linux 7, 8, 9
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, 9
• CentOS Stream 9

The VBoxManage command line interface has been updated to reflect support for Arm guests:

• createvm – Added --platform-architecture option for specifying x86 or Arm architecture when creating a new VM.

VBoxManage createvm --platform-architecture arm --name arm64-machine

• modifyvm – Added --platform-architecture option for specifying x86 or Arm architecture when modifying a VM.

VBoxManage modifyvm x86-machine --platform-architecture arm --name x86-to-arm-machine

2) OCI Integration Enhancements

Oracle VirtualBox 7.1 introduces enhancements to integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) including the ability to reset, clone, and view performance metrics on OCI instances through VirtualBox Manager. Through the VirtualBox Manager interface you can also create, destroy, and manage your OCI instances. With these integrations, you can test applications both locally and on OCI, which allows for the quick development and deployment of applications on the cloud.

The VBoxManage command line interface has been updated to support the new OCI integration features:

• cloud instance clone – New command for cloning cloud VM
  
   
• cloud instance metriclist – New command for getting available cloud VM metric name
  
   
• cloud instance metricdata – New command for getting available cloud VM metric data
  

3) Experience Levels

You can use the VirtualBox Manager user interface, with newly introduced features such as experience levels, to easily manage several virtual machines. Experience levels can be used to display options which are most relevant to the user's experience level. The Expert experience level shows all available options, whereas the Basic experience level hides more advanced features.

Experience levels can be used to display options most relevant to the user’s level of experience. Expert shows all options, Basic shows only the most essential.
 

4) VirtualBox Log Collector

The VirtualBox log collector can be used to debug newly developed Arm native or x86 applications. Logs collected by VBoxBugReport can be shared with support or others from the community to help debug issues. VBoxBugReport will collect SVC logs, networking information, system events, driver information, registry information, and more. Options for the command include:

• --output <path> – Change the path where the logs will be output to
• --text – Produce a single text file instead of a compressed TAR containing logs
• --<vname1> <vmname2> ...  – Collect logs for the provided virtual machine(s) 
• --all – Collect logs for all registered virtual machines

Download VirtualBox 7.1 for Apple Silicon now to test Arm support, experiment with enhanced integration with OCI, try out the new experience levels feature, and debug with the help of the log collector.

Resources

• Learn more about Oracle VirtualBox
• VirtualBox community website
• Visit the Oracle Virtualization Blog
• Oracle VirtualBox User Guide