VirtualBox 7.2 finally adds support for Windows on Arm guests

VirtualBox, the free and open-source software from Oracle that allows you to virtually run multiple OSes on a single physical computer, has gotten a major update, version 7.2. This update brings changes across things like the UI, as well as the usual collection of bug fixes.

For the UI, the global and VM tools have been moved from the hamburger menus. They now live in a new vertical taskbar on the left and in horizontal tabs above the right-hand panel. For Windows on Arm hosts, you can now virtualize Arm VMs, and it is all part of a unified Windows installer package.

On macOS Arm hosts, the team introduced experimental 3D acceleration using a DirectX to Metal translation layer (DXMT), replacing the previous non-working solution. For the macOS/Intel hosts, there is no longer support for 3D acceleration.

This means 3D acceleration is no longer supported on macOS hosts with Intel CPUs. Speaking of Arm, the VirtualBox team says that the saved state from VirtualBox 7.1 is incompatible, so you must shut down any saved Arm VMs before upgrading. Your snapshots will break if you do not. For storage, the NVMe controller emulation is now part of the open-source base package.

As for improvements, the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), reports x86_64 and Arm CPU features better when using Hyper-V as the virtualization engine. The update also brings vboxwebsrv, the web service that lets you remotely manage your VMs, to ARM hosts.

Here are the most notable bug fixes:

• Fixed a cloning wizard bug that prevented snapshots from being included in the cloned virtual machine.
• Addressed a corruption issue that could happen when resizing VMDK disk images.
• Corrected multiple issues within the NAT networking engine, improving DNS server detection and fixing a potential crash.
• Fixed an API bug that caused OVF or OVA imports to create broken virtual machines on Arm systems.
• Fixed an API issue where exporting a VM with an inaccessible disk resulted in a crash.
• Addressed a video recording problem that caused frame synchronization issues and a small memory leak.
• Fixed a rare audio-related crash.
• Solved an issue with the TPM that caused failures when loading from a saved state.
• Removed a release assertion on Windows hosts that could crash the VBoxUsbMon driver if unloading failed.
• Corrected keyboard translation in the BIOS and fixed error reporting for single-sided floppy disks.

You can browse the full changelog and download VirtualBox 7.2 for your platform: Windows, Mac (Apple Silicon | Intel), or Linux.