virtualbox.org

Hi all,

It seems that Virtualbox lives in a grown up world since by default it installs guests in the user profile / home directory... a nice touch

However, I don't want to presume that this means what I want to do will be safe:

My setup is a dual-core intel Centrino physical host that dual boots Windows XPsp3-32 and Ubuntu 9.04-64.

Both run VirtualBox 3.0.2 but I would like to share a single guest (its VDI files exist on a common NTFS filesystem used by both OSs).

1. Could I see problems starting and stopping the guest?
2. Do I need to be careful not to do things like pausing the guest on one host and un-pausing it on (or after booting) the other host?
3. This is a bit far-fetched, but if I wanted to use VMware Server on the WinXP-32 host (instead of VirtualBox), would it be:
a. stupid but possible or
b. stupid and improbable?

I know it is a weird first post (apologies), please humour me

You are talking about something which is not officially supported and not likely to get much unofficial support either ... but with some care it can be made to work. I have a VM on an external hard drive which I can successfully start from two separate machines running vbox.

You will need to mess around, at your own risk, with the main virtualbox .xml file on each host installation.

Pausing on one host and resuming on another ... less likely to work.

As for sharing between vbox and vmware server - I don't have a good feeling about that! You should be able to share a .vmdk as a secondary drive, but I doubt a boot drive will work. ... Try it and see.

Dangerous as in might you lost the entire virtual disk? Yes.

Woot! Thanks SecretCode! Now I am enthused about trying, so will create 2 guineapig guests and see how much abuse they can take. Will make a vmdk-based one as well as a vdi-one and see how it goes with each virtual host.

Wish me luck (I will post back my findings). I appreciate the pointers- it is sometimes best to know what one can hope for.