virtualbox.org

I have a VM with an "immutable" swap partition, and tmp partition, as those data should not be permanently stored. I was planing on having the VM shutdown once a day, copy the snapshot files as backup, and then restart the VM, but discovered that the snapshot files for immutable VDI aren't cleared at shutdown, but only at start. This is a waste of disk space, and in my case backup space. How do I get around this?

I too would REALLY like it to work that way. I want to use Virtualbox to manage a lab of computers and make some of the disks immutable so kids can't change them. But trying to manage the temporary snapshots that Virtualbox makes on immutable disks, make it tough; I often can't start the VM because it can't find a temporary snapshot file.

In theory, it seems like VB should be able to get rid of them when a virtual instance is shutdown. Is that a possibility?

If no one can give me any useful advice, I'll try this: Since my VMs are configured as Linux "services" in the host, I will change the /etc/init.d script to perform a "revert to snapshot" on the immutable VDI after a successful VM stop. Something equivalent might also be possible under Windows using batch files.

shadowdemon wrote:If no one can give me any useful advice, I'll try this: Since my VMs are configured as Linux "services" in the host, I will change the /etc/init.d script to perform a "revert to snapshot" on the immutable VDI after a successful VM stop. Something equivalent might also be possible under Windows using batch files.

Unless you are programming to the COM interface and can perform that on a single VDI file, 'Revert to Snapshot' will not do what you want, because it will also revert all of the other VDIs as well, undoing any changes made to all virtual disks.

Any news on this issue?

I just run into it using 4.3.10 r93012 on Ubuntu.

The snapshots can not be used for any purpuse after the VM is shut down, right? So they are just wasting storage.