virtualbox.org

This is my first post, so greetings!

I looked around the forums but I wasn't able to find if the following scenario is possible:

- Run VirtualBox 2.2.2 two different workstations, one OSX 10.5, the other windows Vista
- Have a Windows XP home VM live on a NAS that is accessible by both workstations
- Be able to load the VM from either workstation (one or the other)
- Primarily the VM will be accessed by the OSX machine but as a failsafe it would be nice to be able to load it from the Vista machine.

I realize that I could install the VM on one and do regular exports to the NAS but the above would be ideal. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

You would need gigabit lan or this will be very slowwwwwww.

It is on Gb LAN. Is this possible though?

@mgrunert:
Welcome to the forum !
Technically there is no limitation to this. A NAS should technically be treated as any storage (Samba share, NFS, share, iSCSI target used as HDD). Be aware that VBox is no „enterprise“ solution where you can group several running VBox Hosts similar to VMWare Esx or Citrix XenServer.
So you have to ensure manually that the virtual HDD you have at the NAS is only used by one machine at the same time. If VBox is starting the same image from two host I guess bad things can happen.

As vbox4me2 already stated 1GBit LAN is very useful. 100 MBit translates to 12.5 MB/s. This is of course without taking any network headers into account. I wouldn´t say that GBit is a must have. I recently did some experiments with iSCSI targets and VBox over 100 MBit. While the installation of Win2k on the VM really took verrry long the handling itself was not so bad. Heavy disk I/O will require of cource GBit or Firewire Networking. Firewire means at least 50 MB/s whereas 1GBit translates to 128 MB/s.

So, yes, it´s possible. A fast connection to the NAS will help. The VMs you set up on both hosts should have identical configuration of course and have always to be in sync.

Hope this helps,
Holger

Thanks, both of you for your replies!

How would you set this up so that the appliance lives completely on the NAS?

I can see how during the initial setup you could partition VM space on the NAS, but the configuration files for the VM live on the Host OS correct? I might just stick to exporting the VM to the NAS on a regular basis.

Does anyone know if there are any issues exporting an appliance from an OSX host OS of Virtualbox and then importing it into a Windows Vista host?

You need to map a drive letter to the NAS share, after that you have to edit the .xml files to relocate the vdi or re-register the vdi from the gui.