[Novalug] Importing VirtualBox Appliances

[John Franklin]

On Dec 2, 2010, at 6:54 PM, Nick Danger wrote:

> On 12/02/2010 06:51 PM, Roger W. Broseus wrote:
>> As a potential solution to an installation problem of Win-7 on a laptop,
>> discussed in a previous post, I'm considering exporting an "appliance" to move
>> the working Win-7 installation to my Laptop via import of the appliance.
>> 
>> Is this possible, i.e., have you done analogous moves? Is this a dumb question???
>> 
>> Might there be problems because of differing hardware? Both are running Ubuntu
>> 10.04 "Lucid."
>> 
> You can move the virtual instance around. It should be (if I remember 
> correctly) a file ending in .vdi. Just move that to the new PC, run vbox 
> and 'import' it.


The VDI is just a disk image.  The machine definition (ie., memory, drive mapping, network mapping) is stored in an XML file somewhere else near the disk image.  On a Mac, they're all in a tree of subdirectories ~/Library/VirtualBox/{HardDisks,Machines}/.  I don't remember where it is on a Linux box.

The export creates two files, a VMDK (the disk image) and an .OVF file (the XML).  (Why they don't then tar or zip the two together into a .vbappliance file is beyond me.)

jf
-- 
John Franklin
franklin at elfie.org
ICBM: 39º 01' 58.4"N 77º 24' 49.6"W Z+84m

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