virtualbox.org

I am taking a sysadmin course at uni, which as part of lab exercise, will have to work on virtual machines.

Sometimes I work from home and sometimes I work at uni, so I prefer to put the virtual machines on my USB drive. However I can't simply import / export appliances, because the live copy is on the USB drive. Suppose if I work on my virtual machines at home, turn them off, then plug my USB drive to the uni computer, then I need to open these virtual machines (changed by my home computer) on the uni computer and continue work.

In this case, how can I make the machine metadata go with the virtual machine?

Thanks!

Mark

mark.farnell wrote:In this case, how can I make the machine metadata go with the virtual machine?

You can't. Create a new VM on each machine that needs one, make sure you get all VM settings exactly the same, and select "Use existing" when it comes to the HDD creation step, selecting the VDI file on the USB drive. This is no great hardship, as creating a VM is quick and only needs to be done once per host machine. You don't say what the guest OS is (*): some will not be happy with the hardware changes that might occur when moving a working OS image between hosts. For example CPU type is not hidden from the guest.

And btw: I assume you realize that disk I/O performance will be terrible on USB. Personally I would live with copying the VDI file onto the local drive.


(*) Please update your profile to indicate your VirtualBox version, and your most common host OS and guest OS types.

In both cases, I am using OS X 10.6, one is MacBook, and one is iMac, although sometimes I will use Ubuntu 10.04