Same Guest, Two different OS's, on same machine?

[recobb]

Haven't been able to find an answer to this specific question, so:

I have a dual boot machine, XP and Fedora Linux, which I generally boot into on alternate days. I would like to be able to run the same guests from both OS's, and have changes made in one be effective in the other. I realize I could export from one and then import into the other, but the two versions would rapidly be out of sync again. The majority of my data is stored in a separate drive that is accessible by both OS's, so I could store the VB's there for both OS's.

My guess is that you can't do what I want to, but I'd love to be proved wrong!

Thanks,

Richard Cobb

[Sasquatch]

I've explained this to other users a couple of times in the past. Strange that you didn't find any records of that. Anyway, it can be done. Just make sure the settings are exactly the same. This can be done by copying the settings file and use Machine > Add to add the VM definitions to the other OS. Then point to the generic location of the VDI and you're good. Just make sure that if you change anything to the VM settings, you apply that to the other Host as well. Snapshots are out of the question, as they are stored with the VM settings by default and are kept in the VM settings file. You have to keep editing that file to include any changes and you're bound to forget it at some time, screwing up the entire VM.

One last thing: If the VDI resides on an NTFS partition (recommended), do NOT allow Windows to defragment it. As long as you do that, you won't loose your VDI file. I've had it happen in the past when I was sharing my VDIs between Windows and Linux, and after Windows did a defrag on the drive, at next boot of Windows it forced a checkdisk because it detected errors. Surely enough, an error was found and the VDI was 0 bytes as a result. Windows corrupted it's own file system with the defrag. Lost several VMs because of that. After that, I never let it defrag and no more issues with it.