virtualbox.org

Oh, OK! That command is for importing an OVA, an appliance. It does take a long time, because the virtual disk must be de-compressed & unpacked from the OVA file. The host disk read & write speeds are the limit.

The long time does not result because the process is launched via Vboxmanage. Manually importing an appliance via main Virtualbox window, File Menu, Import takes the same length of time.

The process you were attempting to manually edit the XML amounts to registering the guest with Virtualbox. and the Vboxmanage command for registering a guest is super quick and much more reliable than editing the XML.

Your students are going to have to wait either way, because they have to do a download/de-compress/copy of the guests to get the guest files on the PC, then registering is really fast. If you can speed up getting the properly-constructed guest folder on their PCs, then a quick Vboxmanage to register the guest will work.

"Importing" is quite different from "registering". If you want your students not to complain, you should have the VM prepared for registering, not importing. The biggest difference? Importing creates a new virtual HD, and if we're talking about a multi-gigabyte VM, yeah, it's going to take time.

On the other hand, if you have prepared a VM with a VDI that's ready to go, it's going to take a maximum of 1.245 sec.

If only I'd said I was using an import appliance command from the start. I'll take a new approach then and try registering.

Thanks for all the suggestions and teaching me new things.