Moving a virtual machine to a physical box

This is for discussing general topics about how to use VirtualBox.
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SergeantFTC
Posts: 1
Joined: 21. Jan 2011, 20:44
Primary OS: MS Windows 7
VBox Version: VirtualBox+Oracle ExtPack
Guest OSses: Ubuntu,Fedora,Windows,etc.

Moving a virtual machine to a physical box

Post by SergeantFTC »

What is the best way to take a virtual hard drive file and move it to a physical hard drive?
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39134
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: VirtualBox+Oracle ExtPack
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: Moving a virtual machine to a physical box

Post by mpack »

Asked and answered many times. Search for "migration". You can also search for "P2V" (Physical to Virtual) because although that is the term used most often around here, in fact the direction of the migration hardly matters; P2V, V2P, P2P, V2V - the techniques and issues are the same; image disk, copy image to new host, cope with hardware differences. Some imaging tools making moving in a particular direction easier (e.g. Disk2VHD), but it's still the same fundamental technique.
HubTou
Posts: 93
Joined: 24. Nov 2009, 11:01
Primary OS: FreeBSD
VBox Version: OSE other
Guest OSses: FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and several Linuxes

Re: Moving a virtual machine to a physical box

Post by HubTou »

Hello,

The main difficulty lies in this "Cope with hardware differences" part (mainly the kind of hard drives and their geometry. Plus issues with drivers for the network, video, etc.).

I wrote an article about this about which, you'll find the link in http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=36552

Best regards,

Hubert
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