Please do NOT use this VirtualBox Beta release on production machines. A VirtualBox Beta release should be considered a bleeding-edge release meant for early evaluation and testing purposes.

You can download the binaries here.

Please do NOT open bug reports at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Bugtracker but use our VirtualBox Beta Feedback forum to report any problems with the Beta. Please concentrate on reporting regressions since VirtualBox 4.1.18.

VirtualBox 4.2 will be a new major release. The following major new features were added:

Improved Windows 8 support, in particular many 3D-related fixes
GUI: VM groups (bug #288)
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 (bug #8805)
Resource control: added support for limiting network IO bandwidth; see the manual for more information
Added possibility to start VMs during system boot on Linux, OS X and Solaris; see the manual for more information (bug #950)
Added experimental support for Drag'n'drop from the host to Linux guests. Support for more guests and for guest-to-host is planned. (bug #81)

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

VMM: improved VM context switch performance for Intel CPUs using nested paging
VMM: added support for FlushByASID features of AMD CPUs (Bulldozer and newer)
VMM: fixed unreal mode handling on older CPUs with VT-x (gPXE, Solaris 7/8/9; bug #9941)
VMM: fixed MP tables fixes for I/O APIC interrupt routing relevant for ancient SMP guests (e.g. old OS/2 releases)
VMM: support recent VIA CPUs (bug #10005)
GUI: network operations manager
GUI: allow taking screenshots of the current VM window content
GUI: allow automatically sorting of the VM list
GUI: allow starting of headless VMs from the GUI
GUI: allow reset, shutdown and poweroff from the Manager window
GUI: allow to globally limit the maximum screen resolution for guests
GUI: show the full medium part on hovering the list of recently used ISO images
GUI: do not create additional folders when a new machine has a separator character in its name (bug #6541)
GUI: don't crash on terminate if the settings dialog is still open (bug #9973)
Snapshots: fixed a crash when restoring an old snapshot when powering off a VM (bug #10491)
Settings: sanitise the name of VM folders and settings file (bug #10549)
Settings: allow to store the iSCSI initiator secret encrypted
E1000: 802.1q VLAN support
Storage: implemented burning of audio CDs in passthrough mode
Storage: implemented support for discarding unused image blocks through TRIM for SATA and IDE and UNMAP for SCSI when using VDI images
Storage: added support for QED images
Storage: added support for QCOW (full support for v1 and readonly support for v2 images)
Storage: added readonly support for VHDX images
Solaris additions: added support for X.org Server 1.11 and 1.12
Windows hosts: no need to recreate host-only adapters after a VirtualBox update
Windows hosts: updated toolchain; make the source code compatible to VC 2010 and enable some security-related compiler options

This list is not complete. This is a first beta and the code still needs some polishing and not all new features are documented yet. Although we already did a lot of testing and don't expect critical regressions, please backup your data before trying this Beta.