Sharing vms on multi boot

[virvirtualis]

Hello,

ich have searched the forums but so far found nothing concerning sharing, multi boot, dual booting and reusing vms.

Have any of you recommendations how to go about sharing VMS on (one) multi-boot machine?

I run OSX SnowLeopard, Linux Gentoo and Windows 7 as a triple boot on my Mac.
I have a Linux, an XP and a Windows 7 VM that I want to use from each of the three host systems.
I run 4.0.0 (and I don't feel the need to go back to 3.X).

- What do you recommend as the file system for storage ? Currently using NTFS, with NTFS-3G + MacFuse on OSX and ntfs-3g on linux; I wanted to use HFS, but I don't trust the Win7 drivers.
- How should I go about exporting/importing the settings?
So far I have come up with two ways, both less than ideal:
1. manually create the vm in the same way on each host and attach the existing drives (Well, duh)
2. save the machines as .OVA (export appliance), import into each host, kill the imported disk and attach to existing (less hassle, takes longer, pointless (afterwards deleted) copies of vm disks made)
(3. I considered mucking about with the XML configs but that road -manually changing less than trivial config files- usually leads to perdition)

Suggestions appreciated
vv

[Technologov]

I think you need to create new v4.0 machines (so that new v4.0 portability architecture kicks in), and then import those VMs into your other host OSes. You can attach old disk images to those new VMs.

I assume you triple boot on one physical host -- otherwise you won't use NTFS. Yes NTFS is your only choice.

1. Create VMs on only one host, then import them to all other hosts.
2. You don't have to use OVA/OVF.

This way you will have one set of VMs accessible from all host OSes.

NOTE: There is a known bug in v4.0 that prevents importing with configured shared folders. You will need to manually edit XMLs.
-or- you can try to use those after you configure all the VMs on all hosts.
NOTE2: Don't try to to use Live Snapshot with 3D acceleration. It doesn't work either.

-Technologov

[virvirtualis]

Thanks for the reply. Yes it is one physical host I am triple booting. So it is kind of inverse - not booting multiple VMs, but booting the same VM on three different hosts OSes on the same physical computer.
(note: the reason for that being that inside the VM i have my stable dev environment).

Since you mention importing VMs without OVA/OVF, do you mean by that to add the old physical disks and manually recreate the settings?
With OVF/OVA settings are imported along with the disks.
I know it's not that much work to recreate the settings, even when they are complex, but still I wonder if there is a way to export/import the settings only and then -as you said- attach the "shared" vm disks to the created vms.

regards
vv

[Technologov]

><Since you mention importing VMs without OVA/OVF, do you mean by that to add the old physical disks and manually recreate the settings?

Not at all !

v4.0 has new import mechanism which is better: VBox Manager GUI->"Machine->Add"
Try it.

To my knowledge it will work with all cases, except Live Snapshots and except Shared Folders.