export / import a virtual machine with all its snapshots

[fourchette]

basically i'm not trying to clone a machine. basically merging all snapshots to be able to clone is a big no go. we do a lot of QA and the value is with the snapshots.

i just want to be able to import / export a complete virtual machine along with all its snapshots easily, from a physical machine to another.

i tryed with the offered "import appliance" *.ovf format but it does not seem to include all snapshots.

the way i see it, the only way to export / import the machine with all it's snapshots is to
* copy the complete Machines subdirectory corresponding to the virtual machine to be copied
* copy the right .vdi correspond to the virtual machine to be copied located in HardDisks directory
* merge the .virtualBox/VirtualBox.xml nodes corresponding the virtual machine to be copied

the tricky part is with the 3rd point. manual xml editing is a complete mess. it does work to a certain extend, but it's a mess.

besides, we have been doing this is some colleagues at work, but we all have 3.2.0 version, but what if some of us had a 3.2.8 version and trying to "migrate" a virtual machine between the two... we have not tryed it, but it's bound to happen at some point. Besides, i have noted that the release notes of 3.2.8 recommand to upgrade the additionnals too, which requires to modify a lot of snapshots again i do not like it much.

so my questions are
* is there some native way to migrate an existing virtual machine with all its snapshots into another virtualbox setup ? (appart from the copy files + manual edit of xml settings)
* is there an already existing thrid party tool performing such an action ? (for instance a i saw a virtualbox gems 0.7.5 by Mitchell Hashimoto http://github.com/mitchellh/virtualbox#readme but it does not seem to support the kind of feature i am look for)
* would anyone be interested in such a feature ? (i may code a ruby gem for that and/or help modify Mitchell Hashimoto gem)

thanks
alex

[dpghia]

Greetings! Do you have the optimal solution? VirtualBox 4.1.2 has the same bad actitude

[mpack]

Greetings! Do you have the optimal solution? VirtualBox 4.1.2 has the same bad actitude

Virtual Machines, complete with snapshot hierarchy if you use them, are easily portable in VirtualBox v4.x without the need to use import/export. You just copy the VM folder.

The only proviso is that the machine must have been created by v4; for backwards compatibility reasons, machines created by v3.x or earlier retain the central media registry that makes portability difficult. It's possible that the new clone feature could provide a solution to converting VMs to v4 layouts, unfortunately the devteam chose not to clone all of the information that would avoid activation in Windows, so this solution isn't perfect.