Sharing Virtualbox Guests

[mwm]

I am in the processing of building a computer that will dual boot Windows 7 (maybe 10) and Linux (Kali). I want to install multiple VMs within Windows (XP, Ubuntu, etc), but would also like to be able to open these same VMs when I am booted into Kali. I have seen outdated tutorials online saying that you can point a new VM to an existing vdi file, but it seems like people have issues accessing snapshots from multiple hosts as well as any changes that get applied to one of the guests does not replicate when opened from another host. Not sure if this matters, but I have one SSD for Windows (where I plan to install the VMs) and a separate SSD for Kali.

Is there a recommended way to accomplish this?

[socratis]

Now, that's an interesting question. Sounds like a nice challenge. It just so happens that I have two computers next to each other (OSX10.9.5 and Windows7), which I thought could be used to simulate your situation. Think of it as dual-booting.

I created a test VM on host A. Then I added it to host B. There was no concurrent access. Everything worked right out of the box. Settings, snapshots, reversion to previous snapshots, saved states, pretty much everything.

One thing I would be careful is shared folders. I shared from one host but it wasn't working on the other. No surprises here. The paths are referenced differently between Windows and the others.

So, I my advice to you would be that instead of reading outdated "tutorials" online, just try it. It took me 1/2 hour for this test.

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ModEdit : Moving to "Using VirtualBox" since you're dual-booting and multi-guesting.

[Perryg]

One thing to watch out for is format. While the Linux OS has built in support for ntfs Windows does not have built in access to Ext* or any other normal Linux format for that matter. You will need a third party program unless you always ntfs, which is slower on Linux by a lot.

[socratis]

Yeap, interesting point, didn't think of that one. Since there are going to be at least two filesystems, what if the VM was created/hosted on the Windows side (NTFS) and then accessed from the Linux side? That would work right out of the box.

[Perryg]

Yes it works but somewhat slower ( I/O )due to translation.

[mwm]

Thanks for the responses! Good call on the format compatibility, I hadn't considered that. Still waiting to receive all the parts for the PC build, so just trying to get a plan together for how I'm going to set it up. Hope to have it up and running in the next week or so.