I want to distribute / market an image of the virtual box

[marketingdigitalmassivo]

I want to distribute / market an image of the virtual box ready in windows 7! I need to control use of 1 instance per machine ... After 1 year of use it automatically locks. How can I do this?

[socratis]

VirtualBox doesn't lock anything. You need to talk to whoever is locking things. Microsoft?

[BillG]

A brief comment on your use of terms. VirtualBox is the name of the program. The virtual machine you create is referred to a the virtual machine or the guest.

The image would be an image of the virtual machine or of the guest.

[marketingdigitalmassivo]

Yes, I do not think they understood my doubt ...
I want to know if ...
can you distribute an image of VirtualBox from a server machine ready with limiting by machine?

[mpack]

I think I understood the original wording better.

Socratis already gave you the correct answer: there is no feature in VirtualBox which limits how many times you copy a VM nor which hosts you copy it to. VirtualBox implements no time limit of any kind for VMs, so the premise of your question is mistaken.

However, the guest OS may not be so sanguine, and yes it can detect certain differences between hosts - the CPU definitely and the network neighborhood too perhaps. And that's assuming that you distribute the VM in an optimal way, and we don't know if you're doing that. If you copy a VM in a non-optimal way then it may deactivate immediately.

Windows 7 licensing and activation questions are best sent to Microsoft.

[marketingdigitalmassivo]

I'm not talking about the operating system itself. But the marketing programs that go into it and are in a VM of the virtual box ... I do not know if I can get this type of block via Virtual Box or via Windows ... but as they said it has no way to limit the VM ... I think What I understand now

[mpack]

Have we misunderstood the question? Are you asking how you can force your own VMs to disable themselves after a year of use? If yes then I'm afraid that the answer remains the same: VirtualBox has no such feature. In fact I don't believe any such feature would even be possible in a self contained system - it would require an external activation service.