VBox guest in VBox guest ...

[JimCheetham]

I'm having limited success with a testrig, and I'm now wondering if what I'm trying is even supposed to work ...

I want to replicate a live server's setup, for testing purposes. This means that the eventual guest machine will need to have the same IP addresses as the original, and I need to be able to talk to them.

I didn't want to change the routing on my desktop (i.e. I still want to talk to the real server), so I thought I'd set up a VBox guest as an access machine, and I'd change the routing on that (using VB OSE on Ubuntu).

Then I need a place to run the VBox guest for the test server. I could probably just run this as another VBox guest from my desktop, and use intnet to connect it to the access machine. But I thought it would be 'neater' to have the test server live as a VBox guest inside the access server, so I can stop/start both of them together all the time.

I installed VBox PUEL in the access server (so I can use VRDP), but the guests in there don't seem to boot properly/completely. I can get Ubuntu 10.04 server to start up, but it hangs with a black screen as soon as I select "install". I tried voyage linux, and that hung shortly after startup.

This makes me wonder if guest-in-guest is going to work at all -- perhaps VBox doesn't provide sufficient facilities to run another VBox inside it?

[Perryg]

You can not run VirtualBox inside VirtualBox. For that matter you can not run any virtualizer inside another virtualizer (usually) and even if you can you really should not as this can corrupt the drive.

[JimCheetham]

This makes me wonder if guest-in-guest is going to work at all -- perhaps VBox doesn't provide sufficient facilities to run another VBox inside it?

OK, I should be reading the "Virtualization inside a virtualizer, discussions" thread instead. Sorry.

[JimCheetham]

qemu inside VBox seems to work OK, I just booted Voyage linux without a problem (except of course it is slow!)

Code: Select all

$ qemu -m 265 -cdrom voyage-current.ISO -boot d -vnc :0

[Perryg]

Not to mention that you must be careful. As I said before doing this can corrupt the drive.
Anyway this is not supported here. You can carry on in the virtualizer inside a virtualizer forum.
Plus qemu is an emulator and not a virtualizer.