virtualbox.org

My goal is to use my normal machine for a host for evaluating and training on various operating systems. I like the cross-platform nature of VirtualBox. I want the convenience of a pen drive hosted OS so that I can use different PC's as the host.

What I intend is to run my host on a thumb drive. So I need a thumb drive image that has virtualbox installed, or a live-cd that I can convert to a bootable thumb drive. I want the OS running the host to have as small of a footprint as possible, so that as much of the system resources are available to the guest operating systems as possible. It would also be nice if the distro had easy recognition of Windows compatible disk formats, since most of my systems run windows.

I searched for this first, but all the hits I get are about checking out live cd's using virtualbox. I did see a forum post here, but it was 3 years old. http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13

1. Live CD/pen drive distribution with VirtualBox already installed.
2. NTFS support built-in. (optional)

Thx,
Xal

Funny, today I started to work on just that, see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=688872 and build your own, at the moment building a ISO for testing with vbox 3.2.12 build in based on 9.10 desktop live CD, so far no errors building it.

You can always install Linux on your thumb drive using a computer that has no HDD connected to it. I got Debian with X and a DM on a 512 MB disk and room to spare (about 50 megs or so, maybe more, I forgot the actual disk consumption). You just have to make sure the system you're trying to boot with your thumb drive properly supports USB boot.

I'm doing this with vboot. I have a VHD file (and Grub2) on my thumb drive, which contains a bootable Ubuntu "virtual disk" into which VirtualBox has been installed.

The advantages of vboot (compared to actually installing the host OS/Virtualbox on the thumb drive) are:

1) easy to swap whole OSes in and out as you need them - they're just files.

2) similarly, easy to put multiple OSes on your thumb drive (each in its own VHD/VDI/whatever) - no headaches of having to partition it, which Windows doesn't allow (without a struggle).

3) you can "wear level" your thumb drive, to a degree, by putting multiple copies of your OS image file on it, and alternating the one you choose to boot into.

4) Works with Windows too (ie. you can boot directly into a "windows.vhd" on the thumb drive, without it having to be Win 7 Ultimate/Enterprise).

5) You can also stash a few utility boot images and ISOs on it, thus having one USB key that does everything you need.

6) you can also boot them in VirtualBox on your home system, for tinkering.

7) best of all, it supports the same differencing/snapshotting functions as Virtualbox itself (selected by hitting a key at the boot menu), so you can boot into exactly the same OS configuration every time, if you want (ie. your fedora.vhd doesn't get changed).

8 ) I haven't tried this yet, but for systems which don't nicely boot from USB, you could instead (theoretically, afaik, etc, etc) have a boot CD/DVD containing your two bootable OS "virtual disks", with grub set up to put a differencing file on a USB thumb drive that you also stick in. So you can still maintain state between boots, despite having booted from read-only media. In theory!

I'm not affiliated btw, and ymmv. I just happen to be trying it out myself at the moment, because I wanted to see if the above could be realised (so far so good).

Thanks for all of the input. I decided, due to time constraints with a cert test looming, to go ahead and install Vbox on my primary workstation (built for gaming but hey, whatever works, right?) I like the Vboot idea. I will save it for when I finish studying for my cert. No time for "playing" with 1 week left to study...