virtualbox.org

Sorry if this is a common question, when I googled I got an answer from 2007 saying it was difficult, but an article from 2012 (I can't post the link as a new member) suggests much has changed since then... but that is about cloning and I want to transfer rather than clone a VM.

I want to have a Windows VM for development work, that is in some way portable. I was thinking of putting it on an external drive but for performance I think it would be nicer to copy the VM onto whichever PC I am using... if I go travelling for 2 weeks with my MacBook I copy it from my Windows PC and then copy the new version back when I return.

I'm a noob to VirtualBox and not very experienced with VMs so it's unclear to me if there is such a thing as "the VM" I can just copy as a single file, or if the VM and the disk are separate.

How easy is what I want to do - as simple as drag'n'drop? Obviously VB would be installed on each PC but for convenience and license reasons I don't want to create separate VMs on each device and copy the VHD only, I'm after a neat self-contained package, if that's possible these days, with two OS being involved?

Thanks for any advice - including "don't do it, just install on a external drive instead" if that's going to make my life easier!

Yes, variations on this theme has been discussed many times. The link below is to one of the more recent examples.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=54611

VM and disk are separate, just like the disk in your physical PC is distinct from the PC (by which most people would mean the motherboard and CPU). The VM is largely defined by the .vbox and .vdi files, but in fact everything in the VM folder (including the folder itself) should be treated as one unit of movement.

Thanks for the link. So it seems fairly easy to transfer a VM, but what if I have 2 PCs and I want to fairly regularly move the VM back and forth? Would I delete the old copy of the folder on the target machine just before copying the newer version across each time... and have to keep local copies of the .vbox file on each PC to replace the copied version?

Or in this scenario should I initially copy the whole VM to each new PC, and then only copy the VHD back and forth as each PC already has a VM set up?

Once the VM is registered on both PCs then the simplest way to keep them synced is just to copy the VDI file every now and then. However in that case you absolutely must avoid snapshots.