How do I run VirtualBox from my USB or external hard drive?

[hollywoodtoday]

How do I run VirtualBox from my USB or external hard drive?

I've tried these 2 ways--> but no good-->
1. Vbox.me offers "portable virtual box", but their site doesn't even load.
Portable VirtualBox says "critical error, failed to create the virtualBox, the application will now terminate"

2.Tibo's Portable VirtualBox doesn't work for me, I don't know what it means to install the program to the root of my usb stick.


My GOAL: I want to run virtualBox on my external hard drive, so I can log onto accounts anywhere on any computer. (: ideas?

[Perryg]

We do not support portable virtualbox of any kind.

[hollywoodtoday]

ok

Does anybody have any suggestions to get virtualbox working on my external hardrive?

Seems like it should be easy, just use it instead of my comp hard drive, but I have no clue.

[Perryg]

The problem is VirtualBox does not support booting from USB. You can ( if you know how ) circumvent this but it still is not supported.

[hollywoodtoday]

ok, well I guess I won't be doing it.

I just figured there would be a somewhat easy way, or at least some ideas. I keep reading about programs you can download to your usb, then run programs using it. Doesnt make any sense, but anyway.

Using the internal hard drive will be faster anyway, so Ill use my extra 400gigs for it.


BTW - questions:

Id like to create like 60 virtual machines, but want to take up the least amount of space, I only have 400gigs. So when creating a virtual machine and using ubuntu, one of the requirements is that I provide 4 gigs or 8 gigs or something. What is the least amount of hard drive space I can enter to get ubuntu to install?

And, should I choose dynamic or fixed to use up the least amount of space?

o, and when I use the newest ubuntu iso, its SOOOO slow, ubuntu froze twice and I lose a bunch, so I use an older version that works somewhat better. I hate the slowness of the ubuntu virtual machines. hm, maybe its because Im not installing lately, Im only using ubuntu, and saving the state im at everytime. Its just slow

[mpack]

If your only concern was to minimize host disk space, then you can easily locate VMs on your external drive. What you can't do is create a portable VM, i.e. one that can be used on other hosts without having to install VirtualBox there.

Most external USB drives will be way slow compared to an internal drive, perhaps unusably so. Remember to consider the external filesystem also (e.g. FAT will restrict the file to <4GB).

You can also expect guests to be slow if you starve them of disk space and RAM. You can Google for the system requirements of any guest OS.

[hollywoodtoday]

ok,

Ya, an external hard drive would be too slow most likely. So, yes Ill be saving each machine to the internal drive.

What if I wanted to just save the vm's on a usb drive? I dont mind installing virtual box on other computers. I just want each virtual machine to be portable, so I can log into them anywhere, even if I have to download VB on some computer. Would this cause it too run slow too? It would still be on an external drive, so probably.

Great information btw.

[mpack]

We're talking rather generically here - lets get specific. If the VM is doing a lot of disk I/O then the VM is bound by the speed of the host drive which the virtual disk is located on. Other VM related files are very important, but too small for us to care whether their I/O is fast or not.

So, is the external drive fast? USB2 drives generally aren't, because they're mostly optimized to transport data and not use much power. USB flash drives in particular usually have very slow write speeds, and may wear out quickly if a guest OS is writing continuously. eSATA drives might give you good performance, but unlike USB may not find eSATA ports on every PC you might want to run the VM on (ditto USB3).

All those caveats aside, there's no fundamental barrier to locating the VM folder on any host drive you like, including external ones.

[hollywoodtoday]

This is what I have, says 7200 rpm, is that somewhat quick?
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent ... B002BH4OY8

ya, my goal is to just have 60 virtual machines on a portable disk. If I have to install VM on other computers thats fine too. I think itll come down to me just taking this laptop with me instead of the external drive.

[noteirak]

USB2 tho, don't expect much... especially don't expect more than few VMs to run at the same time.